But Washington is a tough town. And the way I view it is there's a lot of entrenched special interests there, people who are, you know, on one side of the issue or another and they spend enormous sums of money and they convince different senators to taut their way or different congressmen to talk about their issue, and they dig in.
The sentences is paraphrased from the original.  Washington is a tough town that spends enormous amounts of money on congressmen and senators, meaning Washington spends a lot of cash on politics. 