Joseph Bensen Foraker Quotes
The employment had no reference whatever to anything pending in Congress.
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:
Joseph Bensen Foraker, 1846-1917, U. S. Senator (Republican, OH), Quoted in The New York World, September 19, 1908
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
Wisconsin had a particularly tough lobbying law which was to be administered by the secretary of state, who found himself in the embarrassing position of discovering that he, himself, had technically violated the law by sending a signed, political mailing to a lobbyist. He turned himself in, and paid a $50 fine.
This is one of the rare quotations which shows how the paid lobbyists work with a few legislators and legislative staff members to get their legislative changes written into law without having to persuade a majority of the Congressional Committee much less a majority of the Congress. Abramoff went to jail along with others in one of the biggest political scandals in modern America.
See Henry Clay for an earlier expression of this point.
at the Department of Justice He was commenting on the fact that when he was an official of the Civil Rights Division of the U. S. Justice Department, the Southern members of Congress would not allow any appropriated money to be spend for Civil Rights reform activities. So they would do the Civil Rights work and call it something else so the Southerners who dominated the key Congressional Committees just never knew what was happening in the Department. Ideally, government officials would not try and deceive members of Congress, but the racism of a minority of Congress had been corrupting American life and law since the Constitution was originally ratified. Somoral corruption just brought on another type of moral corruption.
