Yeah, you are mostly correct: "My God, we send the vilest, rankest, stupidest people to Congress. A couple days ago, I read that most of Congress is lawyers who couldn't cut it in their law careers. Otherwise, they'd be making millions practicing law. It made a lot of sense." It is either that or they figured out a better angle to get rich and most of them do in spite of their "paltry" compensation by the citizenry. Only the very dumbest or holdouts for honesty don't leave with their fortunes substantially increased. They live in a big feed trough filled by those seeking their favor and who usually get it.
Nothing has changed.
Charlie Rose: “Politics is show business for ugly people.”
The first big corruption cases in the USA were:
Crédit Mobilier scandalThese were penny-ante compared to what goes on today. Today, probably 95% of people in Congress are on the take, maybe more. Look at what "the people in the east" were willing to pay Kari Lake just to drop out of politics for a couple years! She wasn't even in office.
The Crédit Mobilier scandal was a two-part fraud conducted from 1864 to 1867 by the Union Pacific Railroad and the Crédit Mobilier of America construction company in the building of the eastern portion of the First transcontinental railroad. The story was broken by The New York Sun during the 1872 campaign of Ulysses S. Grant.Teapot Dome scandal
The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 1921 to 1923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of an investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies, Fall became the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison, but no one was convicted of paying the bribes
I remember learning about the Crédit Mobilier and Teapot Dome scandals in 11th grade American History (1967-1968) and thinking "Yawn, what's this all about? Who cares? That's ancient history -- the LAST century, for crying out loud!"
Even before those two scandals, there was a lot of corruption during the Civil War and in the steamship industry in the 1830s. Much of the steamship corruption was at the state level and it was small compared to later scandals.
New York Representative Charles Van Wyck, in 1861, argued for the creation of a Select Committee on Government Contracts. He underlined the need by writing “the mania for stealing … almost from the general to the drummer boy.”
It's surprising that it took the crooks in Congress so long to learn how to raid the public treasury and buy votes at a massive scale (hence, the gargantuan debt today).