In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.

I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.

Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.

There should be no place in politics for MPs to make financial gain from private companies in return for lobbying.
We are paid handsomely for the job we do and if you need an extra £100,000 a year on top then you should really be looking for another job.

People in Congress are in a business; they’re trying to buy votes; they’re in the business of competing with one another to get elected. The same Congressman will vote for a different thing if he thinks that’s politically profitable. You don’t have to change Congress. People have a great misconception in this way. They think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It’s nice to elect the right people but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things!

Missouri’s term limits, for example, serve as a restriction, yet Missourians overwhelmingly support them, and they are in effect for members of the Legislature. Noncompete clauses and nepotism laws restrict employment, but they are used to stop unethical behavior. Stopping legislators from immediately becoming lobbyists following their terms is not only common sense, it mirrors similar laws and practices frequently followed in the private sector. I believe this world is made up of imperfect people. Our political process is certainly no different. I also recognize that no law, rule or regulation will fix every problem, but they can certainly help.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done. We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.

I believe that secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people's worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest.
We can't go on like this. I believe it's time we shone the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and forced our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence.

The members of the Congress are rendered ineligible to any civil offices that may be created, or of which the emoluments may be increased, during the term of their election. No offices therefore can be dealt out to the existing members but such as may become vacant by ordinary casualties: and to suppose that these would be sufficient to purchase the guardians of the people, selected by the people themselves, is to renounce every rule by which events ought to be calculated, and to substitute an indiscriminate and unbounded jealousy, with which all reasoning must be vain.

It’s pretty sad that people think low Congressional staff pay is a good thing. Low pay a big reason why money in politics is a problem - you can make a lot more money becoming a lobbyist & setting up a relationship w/ one, since the actual job doesn’t pay enough.

Industry's high powered lobbying effort is actually about much more than just passing bills. A convenient side effect of this lobbying crusade is to apply corporate spin to maximize effect. The rhetoric surrounding the lobbying shapes the broader debate related to who is to blame for obesity and diet-related health problems. Because lawsuits are such a hot-button issue, industry can take full advantage of the popular scapegoating of trial lawyers, while at the same time invoke all-American values and shove the personal responsibility theory down the nation's collective throat.

No federal or state legislature, no president, and no state governor has ever... suggested that billionaires and corporations have a First Amendment "right" to unlimited political bribery. Congress has instead criminalized such behavior repeatedly.

We ought to look at what they stood for and perhaps ban any from participating in Congress for upholding the abomination that slavery was.

Can't-do guys do all right in Washington, perhaps because lobbying is the one thing that can't-do guys almost always can do, and magnificently. Detroit may not be able to dispose of exhaust very neatly, but it can build a beautiful lobbying machine for selling Government the story of its own inadequacy. What is it in the Washington air that restores the energies of these once dynamic American manufacturers? Something there is that brings out all the latent half-forgotten ingenuity that seems to have abandoned them back in the home plant.