Karen Shepherd: “I am simply not among those people who say that this is a bad institution filled with bad people. Quite the contrary, it…”

“I am simply not among those people who say that this is a bad institution filled with bad people. Quite the contrary, it is an honorable institution, and everybody that I have met here is an honorable person, working extraordinarily hard to do their jobs, and their jobs are doing the people's business. But the fact of the matter is, there is a public perception that we are not serving people as well as we serve lobbyists. The guy who just lost his job cannot take me to dinner. He cannot afford it. And that is the reason why a lobbyist should not be able to take me to dinner. With all due respect to Mr. Mica, he does not understand the bill, and I do not frankly think he has read it. It has very, very broad, tight restrictions on who is a lobbyist. It casts a broad net. Virtually everybody in Washington is going to be defined as a lobbyist, period. They will not be able to do the things that they are able to do now. They will not give us Orioles tickets. they will not give us Kennedy Center tickets. They will not buy us meals, and everything that they are allowed to do will be fully disclosed, and the public will know about it, period. That is how it should be, because we are people, just like every other person who lives in this United States of America, and we are not entitled to special privileges. We are entitled to do our job, to do it well, and to do it honestly, and to do it in the open, and to make sure that everybody knows that. Now, we do work hard.…”