Tommy Boggs, the man who helped make the Washington lobbying community the powerhouse it is, died Sunday night at age 73.

Boggs pulled lots of strings from his perch at the law offices of Patton Boggs, a firm that grew to over 500 attorneys as it rode the explosive growth of the federal government that began in the 1960s. The son of two members of Congress from Louisiana and the sister of ABC News’s Cokie Roberts, Boggs was well-connected in Washington. His two signature successes may have been securing the 1979 congressional bailout of Chrysler and defeating numerous attempts at federal tort reform. It was fear of Boggs’s influence that played a role in the fact that at no time did the architects of Obamacare seriously consider medical-malpractice caps or other tort reform in their bill.

Boggs was always very clear about how the changing federal government had fueled his industry. In an interview with National Journal in June, he explained that the diffusion of power in Congress after Watergate meant that “instead of being run by a handful of people, [it was] run by 535 people.” He mused, “The result being that literally in the early ’70s, you needed—pick your number—100 lobbyists to lobby 25 people, because 25 people ran the government. . . . Now there are 100,000 people in the influence business. Direct lobbyists — you probably have 13,000 to 14,000.”

The late Milton Friedman lamented in 2003 that massive reform of the federal tax system would be much harder than it was the first time it was attempted under Ronald Reagan in 1986 because of the continued growth of the lobbying community since then. “There is a symbiotic relationship between members of Congress and the lobbying community, which likes complexity in the tax system,” he mourned. Tommy Boggs certainly embodied that relationship and helped build the Washington we now know.