John Yarmuth Quotes

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 noticed that the highly organized lobbies in Washington were producing results regardless of the justice or injustice of their demand.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association is behind the bills which have been trying to pre-empt states' labeling laws in the Senate. And they have a lot of money and power in Washington. So it's a classic David versus Goliath story, where corporate lobbying outweighs consumers' rights.

The government is largely influenced by people who advocate corporate welfare and advocate these policies that create this two-tiered society...

You know the way Washington works. Once you start floating ideas, they are immediately attacked by all the different interest groups before the ideas can be brought to fruition.

First, the American legislative process isn't well suited to large and complex measures.

Washington lawyers and politicians have been bedfellows from the moment our nation was conceived.

We've got a thousand lobbyists in thousand dollar suits giving you a thousand reasons we can't change.

It isn't like dealing with a state legislature.

You've got to pass legislation fast and not give the special interests time to cut you up.

The lobbyists are a kind of permanent other government.

Lobbyists can pay consultants to do studies that say anything.

I think politicians in America don't speak up because their local lobbyist has them shut up.

Lobbyists really are experts in their fields and know what they are talking about. That's why the government always listens to them as they tell the government what it's doing wrong and what it should be doing instead.

You've got to just follow the money [in Washington]. You see it. There's no countervailing power.

Listen, Bernie Sanders talks about how Washington is corrupt, both parties are in bed with the lobbyists and special interests. I think he's exactly right.

People think that politics just somehow magically organizes itself. It doesn't work that way. You need to assemble these huge coalitions of 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and tens of thousands of interest groups, and tens of millions of voters, and assemble all those in government to get stuff done.

We have things to say about Congress and all of that. I think we may have our magnum opus coming yet. It's a piece called "Leonard" that I'm very excited about, and I think we're going to see a side of Chris Pine that people haven't really seen yet. That's all I'm going to say, but I'm proud of it.

The inside operation of Congress - the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building - is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

Someone doesn't think immediately, "I want to be a lobbyist."

...the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are beholden to industry. They always will be. And, the American people are fooled when they think that if you can just get McGovern instead of Humphrey, or if you can get a Democrat instead of a Republican, this will be the end of our problems.

What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.

So I think there's going to be a constituent backlash against this thing soon, as they see it moving in that direction...Whether they can pass something before the American public wakes up, I don't know.

I think that many citizens understand how our system works, or rather, fails to work, for structural reasons. But who has the capacity and the incentives to bring change? The banks and other corporations love the system because it allows them to buy legislation that serves their own interests even at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. Incumbent politicians love the system because it allows them to raise millions of dollars toward defending their seats.

I think Donald Trump does want a result. He clearly, in the meeting that we had was trying to sort of push the process along, realizing that the Senate has a role to play and that there are differences of opinion. I think he wants it to be a health care plan, proposal that we can go out there and defend and that he can defend and argue for to the American people.