All Quotes by Zephyr Teachout
“Lobbyists in Washington have a saying, "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu." You know who is at the table? It's lobbyists for big corporations. It's lobbyists for the wealthiest people in world history. Guess who's not at the table right now. Working families. Clean water. Public education. And our infrastructure.”
“The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to.”
“Refusing to grant clemency is a failure of one of the most basic jobs of being governor.”
“The public should have access to unfettered communication and commerce, and the Internet is increasingly the medium where that takes place.”
“The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can't even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day.”
“If the publicly passed campaign finance laws had not been struck down by the Supreme Court, Club for Growth Action would be illegal, and Heritage Action wouldn't have the SuperPAC threat to back up its small ad purchases.”
“Wealthy individuals have always had the capacity to influence politics, of course, but only after two key campaign finance cases - Wisconsin Right to Life and and Citizens United, have they been able to do it in such a large and blatant way.”
“In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.”
“Talking to Republicans who aren't leaders - that's not very difficult both on anti-trust and on campaign finance reform. I think it's a lot more complicated when you talk to highly funded leaders - that's the innate, deeply problematic part of our politics.”
“In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.”