Leadership Quote by Marty Meehan

“Corporate lobbyists writing our laws” is a deliberately inflammatory image, and that’s the point: Meehan isn’t arguing over a few line edits in a committee markup. He’s trying to reset the moral baseline of what counts as legitimate participation in government. The verb “writing” turns influence into authorship, suggesting not just persuasion but ownership. It frames the problem as capture, not corruption in the cinematic sense of a briefcase of cash. The implied scandal is procedural and normalized: the quiet, routinized outsourcing of policy language to people paid to benefit from it.

The phrase “Real lobbying reform” is doing equal work. It preemptively delegitimizes incremental fixes (disclosure tweaks, longer cooling-off periods, ethics trainings) as cosmetic. “Real” is a boundary-drawing move aimed at both colleagues and voters: if you accept the premise that lobbyists are effectively ghostwriting statutes, anything short of severing that pipeline becomes complicity. It’s also a strategic attempt to shift the debate from individual behavior to system design, where reformers can demand structural rules about who drafts legislative text, how amendments are sourced, and what transparency looks like when industry provides “model language.”

Context matters: this line lands in an era when K Street’s power was increasingly visible, when “revolving door” narratives and industry-written provisions (from tax carve-outs to regulatory loopholes) were becoming a bipartisan punchline and a bipartisan habit. Meehan’s intent isn’t subtle; it’s to make an inside-baseball problem legible as a democratic insult. The subtext: Congress has been renting out its pen, and the public is paying the tab.