| MONEY, SEX, AND SELF-INTEREST TAKEN CONTROL OF CAPITOL HILL Now more than ever, Congress runs the country. But who is running Congress? New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Ronald Kessler takes you behind the scenes, conducting unprecedented interviews with more than 350 insiders to reveal the shocking answer to that question. Here are the sex scandals, the dirty financial deals, the abuses of power -- the deepest, darkest secrets of Congress -- exposed for the first time, including: How congressional members -- including the entire House Republican leadership -- used taxpayer dollars to lavishly redecorate their offices with custom-made furniture, including $20,000 chairs. Eyewitness accounts of members engaging in adulterous affairs and wild orgies in the parking lots, back rooms, and hidden chambers of Capitol Hill. Evidence of special-interest money-laundering schemes that put millions into the pockets of our elected officials. Meticulously documented and chock-full of sizzling revelations, Inside Congress is making headlines across the country. Read it -- and find out what your senators and representatives don't want you to know.
If the National Enquirer covered Congress, the result would be something like this. There's a lot here about the petty perks of power: the arrests of powerful members of Congress (and their sometimes even more powerful staffers) that somehow go away; members' use of the Capitol Police as personal chauffeurs; the fixing of members' parking tickets and the squandering of public funds on their custom-made office furniture and other interior decorations. The book also takes a look at the corruption of the current political fund-raising system and as an antidote, supports public campaign finance. But most of all, there's the drumbeat of congressional sex: furtive couplings with staffers and teenaged pages in congressional offices and "hideaways," in parked cars with streetwalkers in broad daylight, even on the steps of the Capitol itself. What makes this book more than just a cynic's delight is that Kessler is a thorough investigative reporter, an alum of both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. So don't be surprised if the stories he breaks here have further impact--after all, Kessler's book on the FBI brought down the Bureau's then director.
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