Yair Lapid Quotes

When it comes to federal elections law, Tom DeLay and his special-interest friends live by one set of rules, and everyone else lives by a very different set.

People ask, quite legitimately, why [Betsy] DeVos and why not a lot of the others? But it's because it has to do with the special interest groups that run a lot of Washington.

I have had lobbyists, and I have had some very good ones. They could do anything.

Not all special interest groups are bad.

We need to focus, not only the buyers of influence, but also on the sellers of influence.

A lot of times, politicians will go to where their strongest force is and do things for them, and that's the type of thing they do that I find offensive.

The permanent institutional expertise class is now no longer the legislators, it's the lobbyists who don't have term limits and are there forever.

Very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears and reads than most people know.

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

In the United States, the two-party system of the old days is seemingly still preserved. But this is only a camouflage of the real situation. In fact, the political life of the United States ... is determined by the struggle and aspirations of pressure groups.

It used to be that your ability to become a chairman of a major committee depended on seniority, what you knew about the subject, and your skill as a legislator, and not it depends on how much money you raise for the party leadership.

The rules are written in Washington DC by members of Congress so as to benefit themselves.

They could care less about the public. The public comes in third. Number one is keeping their power. Number two are the special interests, the people footing the bill. Finally, the public good might be third — if they can profit from it. If there's no profit, they could care less.

The increasing supply of lobbyists should have driven the price of lobbying down, not up. … The most credible explanation … is that clients grew more and more confident that their lobbyists could deliver something of value in exchange for their fees. … The reason companies started buying, in other words, was that Congress began selling.

I found that the corridors of power in Delhi were littered with lobbies of various kinds.

Does it seem like Washington's rigged for the well connected? That's because it is.

It is no secret that Washington, D.C., is a tempest of people and institutions relentlessly seeking power over the lives of everyday Americans.

My thesis is that government is not, in fact, broken. It's just listening to the wrong people, and it's listening to all of this quiet influence. So it's a very robust operation that operates kind of under the surface.

The problem is that when government controls the economy, those who can influence government keep winning, and everybody else just stays the same.

Having been governor of New Mexico, I know that legislation gets passed to benefit those who have money and influence. Then they buy more money and influence. That's one reason why, as governor, I vetoed more than 750 bills and thousands of line items. I did it to keep crony capitalism away from government.

The Democratic Party takes huge amounts of cash from corporations and unions to vote a certain way.

That Hillary Clinton can be president of the United States and a Saudi prince can donate $10 or $15 million dollars, let's say, to the Clinton Foundation and then have access for meetings and policy with the U.S. government, that is something that is very important to me.

Big money and corporate interest drown out a lot of voices.

A lot of what is preventing us from getting things done on the federal level is that there is too much influence from special interests over members of Congress.

The Sheldon Adelsons, the Koch brothers, the George Soroses, what we want to try to do is force them into the parties, not so that Kasich or whoever is going to straight to them and trying to kiss up to special interests, but so the parties have the power and they can direct the money.