Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

“But those regulations are for safety. It’s not to make your workers rich; it’s so they don’t die.”

But the spectacle of the Speaker of the House, who was among the most powerful elected officials in the country, third in line in the order of presidential succession, traveling to the Manhattan office of a billionaire businessman to ask for his help in an internecine congressional fight captures just how far the Republican Party’s fulcrum of power had shifted toward the outside donors by 2011.