Origins and the logic of concentration
In a December 2017 episode, F.H. Buckley traced the rise of K Street to changes in technology and the growth of the federal government. The Federalist Papers, he noted, were written for a specific audience — New York ratifiers — and people assume everyone read them when in fact they did not. With changes in technology came the possibility of a national candidate, “a Trump or Obama who could campaign nationally,” something the founders never expected after George Washington. That produced a concentration of power in the executive branch and, with the expansion of the federal government, particularly after Woodrow Wilson and FDR, a concentration of power in Washington. The stakes of lobbying changed accordingly: creating a national interest group or industry group is no harder than creating a Delaware group, but the payoff is huge because of the expanded federal government, which means “the lobbyists are centered over on K Street, right, rather than over in Delaware.” [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Bob Zadek framed the same dynamic in financial terms, calling it leverage. A group gets a big bang for the buck if it has to rent one office suite on K Street rather than fifty office suites on the state equivalents of K Streets around the country. Buying influence becomes effective and cheap when it is one-stop shopping. Dispersing power away from Washington, he argued, would automatically produce an immediate decrease in corruption and vote-buying, because buying votes in fifty places becomes expensive and therefore there is no concentration of influence. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Buckley acknowledged the objection that the answer is simply to shrink the federal government, and said he would not hold his breath; if the concentration of power is a fixed feature, it makes sense to talk about curbing corruption instead. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
The revolving door
Buckley described a practice he considered legal but corrupt: a congressman, before retiring, having a conversation with a lobbying firm about possible employment. He contrasted it with the treatment of judges, noting that the same conduct would get a person charged with bribery in federal courts, and that it was one reason some trial lawyers in Mississippi ended up in jail after approaching judges with cases before them and suggesting they might take a position of counsel with the firm. He then described the congressional version: a congressman expecting to take a job with a lobbying firm on retirement receives a call from that firm asking that “this little thing” be put into a bill, and the congressman’s answer is apt to be, in his rendering, “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full.” [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
He attributed to an ex-congressman the observation that Congress is a farm team for K Street: on retirement — which he said happens to about half of congressmen — a member can take a job on K Street and double, triple, quadruple, or increase a salary by ten times. He added that much of Washington works the same way, including executive branch people, and noted that Trump told executive branch people they could not work as lobbyists for five years after leaving office, which Buckley called a good start and said he would make permanent. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Proposed remedies
Asked for an achievable wishlist, Buckley said the point is not to reach Nirvana or the Promised Land, and that those who claim it is often have a private agenda of driving conservative or libertarian money out of politics; the matter is one of small corrections. He criticized the Supreme Court for absolving the former governor of Virginia of corruption and bribery when, in his view, the evidence would easily have supported a finding of corruption, and said a tougher anti-bribery law than the Court has given us would be possible, though we are stuck with the current one. He called no limits on candidate expenditures a good thing, because it let a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders come from nowhere, which is good for competition; he called limits on contributions a bad idea and said he would get rid of them, because the campaign finance net lets the big fish swim through while the small fish get caught. On dark money he agreed with Zadek that it resembles the secret ballot, and said that if contributions were totally dark there would be no pay-for-play, which takes care of the corruption angle. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
His third item was “a Chinese Wall between K Street and Congress”: if you work in Congress, you do not go to K Street and do not get a job as a lobbyist thereafter. He described these as three things that would help make a difference — not the Promised Land, but competition. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Across episodes
The topic recurs in the 2022 episodes with Buckley, where the same revolving-door argument is restated in nearly identical terms: the influence of lobbyists, the revolving door between Congress and K Street, the line that Congress is a farm team for K Street, and the figure that half of congressmen become lobbyists after leaving. In the 2022 treatment Buckley adds a historical frame absent from 2017 — the initiative and referendum movement and the Seventeenth Amendment as Western, progressive-origin causes, and the claim that Teddy Roosevelt opposed the influence of money in politics rather than bigness as such, saying bigness is natural. He also argues that the Republican Party gave away the corruption issue to the left and that a progressive conservative or libertarian government has work to do reining in the power of K Street. The 2017 episode supplies the structural explanation — concentration of federal power, leverage, one office suite versus fifty — and the specific remedy of the Chinese Wall; the 2022 episodes supply the historical and partisan framing. Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022) Trumpism After Trump (2022)
A separate use of the phrase appears in a 2019 episode on Benjamin Rush, where Bob Zadek says Rush was a skilled lobbyist despite not being clad in Gucci shoes and having no office on K Street, since there was no K Street at the time. That episode does not otherwise treat the lobbying industry. Founding Healer (2019)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the physical street, its history, its boundaries, or the firms located on it, and they do not name any lobbying firm, trade association, or individual lobbyist. They do not give the text, sponsor, or enactment of any lobbying or ethics statute, nor the name of the Supreme Court case involving the former governor of Virginia or the amendment on which it turned. The claim that about half of congressmen become lobbyists is stated by Buckley without a source in the excerpts, and the excerpts do not say whether the five-year lobbying bar described as a Trump policy was issued as an executive order or in some other form.