Kitty Kelley Quotes
I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress... It's like a secret society up there.
Kelley, Kitty. Interview by Matt Lauer. Today, NBC, 13 Apr. 2010.
Hollings who was one of the senior experienced senators was offended by the degree to which the George W. Bush Administration and the Republican leadership had turned to lobbyists to draft legislation and amendments to pending legislation. Lobbyists often have specialized information that members of Congress do not have, so there has been in modern times communications between lobbyists and members of Congress and their staffs. However, during the Bush Presidency the practice reached an extreme where lobbyists would even write the legislative language and give it to the members in whom they had invested by giving them large campaign contributions and many perks. K Street is the fanciest street in Washington DC with some of the most expensive office space. A substantial proportion of the lobbyists have K Street offices, hence the metaphor.
Trump often used the phrase "Drain the swamp" in his campaigning to mean get ride of the establishment figures who had, for the most part, dominated politics, for decades. When he was elected, he had to appoint a cabinet, but when he did so, it was almost exclusivly made up of people who had been a part of the political and corporate establishment -- the swamp.
In 1908 William Randolph Hurst made public a series of letters showing that the senator was being paid large sums by the Standard Oil company and was also being instructed on pending legislation. See John Archbold. The senator was pressured out of public life:
Catherine "Kitty" Kelley is an American journalist and author of several best-selling unauthorized biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British Royal Family, the Bush family, and Oprah Winfrey.
