“Senator Samuel Foley—dead. Died a minute ago—here at St. Vincent's. At the bedside was state political sidekick, Senator Joseph Paine—“
Why does Mr. Smith go to Washington in the first place? Because when a sitting a Senator dies while still in office, the governor of the state he represents gets to pick someone to fill that seat until the next election. This is one of the first lines in the film, and frames the narrative.
“A young patriot?—Who recites Jefferson and Lincoln?—turned loose in our nation's capital? I think I can [handle him].”
On the surface, Senator Paine presents to Jefferson Smith the image of a man who is decent and good. And, besides, he was also a friend of Jefferson’s late father. What Jefferson does not know, however, is that Senator Paine—whom he looks to as a mentor—is secretly one of the most corrupt politicians in the country, and this line, uttered by Paine in a meeting with his boss, Jim Taylor, illuminates that.
“This isn't any place for you. You're half-way decent. You don't belong here. Go home.”
Saunders is a tough, hard-bitten, cynical D.C. legislative secretary, and in this moment, she sees Smith's earnest idealism and belief in the good of all people, and urges him to leave politics before he gets eaten alive by the system.
“Well, as I said, this is a man's world, Jeff, and you gotta check your ideals outside the door”
Mr. Smith soon enough learns the bitter truth about the man his father once called the finest he’d ever known. After Smith begins to go after Paine and Taylor's operation, Taylor turns it back on Smith and tries to frame him for the crimes they have committed. In this moment, Paine tries to reason with Smith by telling him that this is just the way the system works, and he has to either join its logic or be quiet. Paine reveals his true character when he tells Smith that playing "the game" and abandoning one's ideals is part of growing up and becoming a real politician.
“I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too.”
As Smith winds down a filibuster in which he alone has been speaking on the floor of the Senate, he tries to put a finer point on his plea for goodness and his desire to create a boys' camp. He tries to reason with his fellow senators on a personal level, suggesting that the political system in which they are working is not worth anything if it is not backed up by human decency and people having a neighborly and kind-hearted attitude towards one another.
"I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don't know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for, and he fought for them once, for the only reason any man ever fights for them: Because of one plain simple rule: Love thy neighbor. And in this world today, full of hatred, a man who knows that one rule has a great trust. You know that rule, Mr. Paine. And I loved you for it just as my father did, and you know that you fight for the lost causes harder than for any others."
At the end of his filibuster, Smith tries to level with the corrupt Mr. Paine, who he knows to be an immoral politician. He invokes the memory of his father, and reminds Paine that he, too, once had high ideals, which he has long since compromised. Smith bolsters his argument by suggesting that the world is held together by the Christian rule of decency, "Love thy neighbor."
"And this country is bigger than the Taylors, or you, or me, or anything else. Great principles don't get lost once they come to light; they're right here! You just have to see them again."
At one point in his speech, Smith pleads with his fellow senators not to go looking too far for their ideals. He insists that ideals are more powerful than the corruption of people like Jim Taylor, and that the senators have to simply remember the ideals that they already have in order to see that he is telling the truth.
"I wonder Diz, if this Don Quixote hasn't got the jump on all of us. I wonder if it isn't a curse to go through life wised up like you and me."
As she begins to see that Smith isn't so ridiculous after all, that he has principles and ideals that many of his Washington contemporaries have lost, Clarissa Saunders consults with her best friend, Diz Moore, and tells him that perhaps they have underestimated the young bumpkin.
"If he even starts to convince those senators, you might as well blow your brains out, you know that, don't ya? This is the works, Joe! Either we're out of business or we're bigger than we ever were before. We can't miss a trick. We can't stop at anything until we've smashed this yokel and buried him so deep..."
When it appears that Smith plans to fight back against Paine and Taylor's corruption, Taylor begins to get anxious and urges Paine that they have to fight back with a vengeance if they want to save their careers and gain the upper hand. This quote shows just what a brute Taylor is.
"This is the most titanic battle of modern times. A David without even a slingshot rises to do battle against the mighty Goliath, the Taylor machine, allegedly crooked inside and out. Yeah, and for my money, you can cut out the "allegedly.""
When Smith initiates the filibuster in the Senate, Saunders and Moore celebrate, with Moore going to the phone and dictating a story to his newspaper. He is on Smith's side, and narrates Smith's actions in heroic terms, suggesting that Smith is displaying bravery and fortitude.
