Tag Archives: Aspen Institute

Edwards Beats Drum for Reform: A Review

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Mickey Edwards has always marched to a different drummer. He was a Republican Member of Congress, who didn’t quite fit in with the new breed of neoconservatives that came to dominate the Republican Party in the 1990s. He marched in the same parade as they did. But he sometimes had to do one of those skip steps to keep in sync with his fellow marchers. He instinctively could not conform.

So it comes as no surprise that Edwards, in his latest book, The Parties Versus The People, argues that we rethink the whole concept of party politics and the influence it has over American government. But Edwards is no longer marching to a different drummer. He is a drummer.

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Oklahoma City…Fifteen Years Later

BY MICKEY EDWARDS
 first published on Atlantic.com

 Fifteen years have passed since Timothy McVeigh’s bomb ripped the heart out of my hometown.  Fifteen years since people I knew had their lives cut short by violence planned and executed here in our land by one of our neighbors.  This is one pain that does not diminish over time.

I had represented Oklahoma City in Congress for 16 years.  On the day Timothy McVeigh’s bomb exploded outside a courthouse named for a federal judge I had known, I was far from my home, teaching at Harvard.  I was about to enter a classroom for a 10 o’clock class when I learned of what had happened.  The news was numbing.  Not only was this my home, these people were my friends; my daughter still lived there, my grandchildren lived there.  What was happening?  Who had done this?  Who was safe?

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