Two politicians of diametrically opposite character have utilized the same, populist slogan: Drain the Swamp. Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi popularized the phrase in her party’s 2006 drive for a Congressional majority. A decade later, her characterological opposite Donald Trump pledged the drain that same swamp, unaware of the slogan’s vintage. But let’s be honest: there is a swamp, and the monsters who dwell within it remain as ghoulish as ever.

I say this in light of the ongoing evisceration of Joe Biden’s signature budget bill. At the outset, President Biden had proposed a number of revenue solutions to fund the largest expansion of the social safety net in five decades. One of these was a reasonable increase in the corporate tax rate. Another, even more self-evidently meritorious, was to close the so-called Step-up loophole that allows heirs to escape hundreds of billions of dollars of tax liability every year. Even Mitt Romney had proposed ending that exemption.

But both of these pay-fors are being whittled down, or, in the case of the step-up rule, actively abandoned by moderate Democrats. One-time prairie populist Heidi Heitkamp–reborn in political exile as a lobbyist for big business–has successfully turned her party’s moderates against the step-up loophole. Her justification–and I am not making this up–was that some folks in the heartland might own a $10 million cabin, like Abraham Lincoln’s except worth the life savings of a Wall Street lawyer. Centrists claimed to find this persuasive.

More egregiously, a growing number of centrists have announced their opposition to Medicare prescription-drug price reform. Allowing Medicare to negotiate the costs of prescription drugs, as Canada and many other countries do, would give relief to seniors and free up hundreds of billions of dollars for Biden’s agenda. The current policy allows drug companies to dictate prices no questions asked; it is the definition of corporate welfare. Yet led by Josh Gottheimer (who calls poor states “moochers”), Democrats with ties to the drug industry have come out against a reform that represents Democrats’ core identity as the party of working people.

Lobbyists are hardly shy about flexing their political muscle. Numerous reporters have dredged up instances of K-street influence peddlers gloating over the way they are eating the Democratic Party’s lunch. To be clear, there is a difference between the two major parties. Republicans give the business lobby everything it wants on principle; Democrats at least tend to feel a little embarrassed about it. But as the example of Dick Gephart, former populist turned mega-lobbyist and one of the most contemptible hypocrites in Washington, shows, the institutional Democratic Party is infected by the virus of corruption.

Perhaps the President’s agenda will pass anyway. But already, K Street has taken an historic attempt to rebalance the American economy toward workers, and watered it down to the point where it is far more anemic that progressive leaders had envisioned. This is Washington at Work. Yes, McLean, Virginia, there is a swamp. And it is a reeking bog that the American people rightly view with disgust.