Quotes About Lobbying

Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

The key to fixing public financing is to free politics from big money.

I was in the Woodrow Wilson School of international relations and public policy at Princeton. You have to apply to get in, and I did not originally get in. I lobbied really hard and called many people. I just would not take no for an answer.

The right wing has an ecosystem that is funded by billionaires who want tax cuts.

In almost every case, whenever a tariff or quota is imposed on imports, that tax is strongly supported by the domestic industry getting the protective shield from lower-priced foreign competition. The sugar industry supports sugar tariffs; textile mills lobby for tariffs on foreign clothing.

We have never met with politicians. I don't know the first thing about how to get heard. My suspicion is that it's to donate a lot of money.

The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system.

Military thinkers and actors dominated the new White House and the key departments of state, both military and civilian. Over thirty senior arms industry executives, consultants or advisers were placed in key positions in the military and across government... More than half a dozen important policy positions in the Bush administration were occupied by Lockheed Martin executives, lobbyists or lawyers, reflecting the influence of defence contractors across the breadth of government.

vividly revealed the arms industry's 'constant tendency towards bribery, and the playing off of one country against another to sell arms'. It also exposed the extent to which arms salesmen were supported by their governments: 'It makes one wonder,' commented the Senator, 'whether the army or the navy are just organisations of salesmen for private industry, paid for by the American government.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needs to get business lobbyists in a car and drive them around with a gun to their heads for an hour, explaining: We can give you regulatory reform, OSHA reform, tax relief, tort reform. But if we give you immigration, we won't be in a position to give you anything else, ever again, and you'll have to take your chances with Nancy Pelosi. The Chamber of Commerce has got to learn: You can't have it all.

What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

The new version would cover both opponents and supporters of same-sex marriage. Immediately thereafter, the Family Research Council, an influential conservative Christian lobbying organization, withdrew its support.60 The reason is obvious: Their goal in supporting FADA was not to protect freedom but to signal disapproval of same-sex marriage. It was liberty for me, but not for thee—a repeat of the Puritan mistake.

This is one of the major problems we have. By the way, it was endorsed by leadership on both sides of the aisle and both ends of the Capitol, by the NRA and also by the gun control groups.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

You can make money in a small way without politics. But to make big money, you need to buy the legislature. Can't be done otherwise.

Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.

Not every dollar spent to gain influence on Capitol Hill comes from a big global industrial behemoth. Hundreds of small advocacy groups and nonprofits spend thousands each year to lobby Congress and federal agencies on the issues they care about most, and their efforts often go under the radar.

The criminalization of file sharing is pathetic. It's so pathetic, it's almost funny. Imagine if the radio people would have lobbied for a federal law enforcement agency to raid all homes for illegal transmissions of moving picture experiments in order to stop the invention of television. It's ludicrous.

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

Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government's justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

Money in politics is a huge issue.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

The gun lobby finds waiting periods inconvenient. You have only to ask my husband how inconvenient he finds his wheelchair from time to time.

Nor is it likely that the Republican Party will abandon its goal of attaining a permanent majority, much less renounce the alliances it has cultivated with corporations, religious groups, conservative intellectuals, and powerful lobbies.