Mario Cuomo Quotes

What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for life.

Incumbents have too much power and challengers have too little opportunity.

Washington is rigged to favor people who have an army of lobbyists.

I think the best term limit is to have public financing of campaigns and independent redistricting.

For all the manufactured 'Republican versus Democrat' drama that dominates today's cable news and political rhetoric, the most striking feature of our present-day democracy is not partisan divide - it's a corrupt system that protects incumbents from the consequences that real democracy brings.

Over the past few years special interests have had a larger and larger say over who gets what in America, and the voices of average citizens are being shut out.

Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.

In constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns, the political system is simply unable to function. Its deliberative powers are paralyzed.

Until we totally change the way we elect our leaders, until we remove private money from public campaigns, lying will be the de facto method of governance in this country.

The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes.

Well, I think the great tragedy in American politics is what is legal, not what is illegal.

Law has become a business. Health care has become a business. Unfortunately, politics has also become a business. That really undermines society.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

Sadly we have government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists. That is no way to run the Senate.

If legislators are allowed to continuously redistrict throughout the decade, you are going to have no way of using elections to remove unpopular officeholders because the lines will be redrawn to ensure their reelection.

There has never yet been, among political men, any real and serious attempt to prevent [election] bribery, because there has been no real desire that elections should not be costly. Their costliness is an advantage to those who can afford the expense, by excluding a multitude of competitors.

The people are weary of detecting the voice of a corporation manager in every political utterance, in the legislature, the Governor's messages, in the expressed opinions of mayors of cities and the Senators sent by the State to Washington, and even in the decisions of judges on the bench.

The special interests are protected in Washington and the public interest is submerged.

Redistricting makes the inequities in campaign financing even worse. Most elections are so noncompetitive due to how the lines are drawn that big donors already know who's going to win. So they give to the likely winners to curry favor.

Washington has become a permanent feudal class of insiders …those are people who are formally in office, staffers, journalists, hangers on … that becomes self-perpetuating … a Congress in which 42 percent become lobbyists… You have people coming here with no intention of going back to the farm.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

When I deliver the message to a cross section of Rhode Island that democracy is broken because special interests have relentless power - which prevents politicians from compromising despite popular support on an issue - I don't have any pushback.

We only have politicians who are concerned with being reelected.

Along with Trump, there are few people, on either the right or the left, who would defend the system. The system is, everyone believes, broken: it's an insider's game; it's totally fixed; it serves itself. Trump codified this into a simple and vivid idea: the swamp.

I think our politicians are bought by the highest bidder and that until we clean up our election system, then we cannot make progress on any of the issues. That's what drives me - we must restore our democracy.