That doesn't mean there are no efforts to influence the minority parties, but the principal efforts almost always involve the party in power, the party or the individuals from that party who can deliver results.
To effectively address the scandals in Washington, which revolve around the multiple ways lobbyists use money to buy influence, Congress must reform the lobbying, campaign finance and ethics rules, and create new means for enforcing these rules.
You have parties going on all the time. You have members, when they are thrown in their honor in effect hosting their own huge expensive events, and you have corporations and special interests picking up the tab and getting the favoritism and the relationship with the members of Congress as a result.
Seriously undermine the effort to close the soft-money loophole for 527 groups which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in unlimited soft money being spent to influence the 2004 federal elections.
Democratic and Republican commissioners got heavy pressure this week from members of Congress, and in response they chose to ignore the campaign finance laws.
[The vice president] may face a little embarrassment, but I don't think he will face any practical impact, ... if Gore didn't want to live by that statement, he shouldn't have made it.
It's just one example of the increasing breakdown of any rules in the Congress.
Members use them as slush funds. You just don't have to do this to raise money.
[Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for campaign finance reform, called DeLay] the king of a Washington-lobbyist, influence-money approach for governing America. ... pay-to-play philosophy.
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