Tag Archives: Mickey Edwards

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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California Bulls Leave The Stadium

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

When I first started on Capitol Hill (23 years ago…man, I am getting old), I was not terribly sophisticated in the world of politics. For example, I couldn’t quite come to grips that one of the most powerful men in the House of Representatives had the same last name as a famous comedian who spent every Labor Day raising money for disabled kids.

Jerry Lewis, at that time, was Chairman of the House Republican Conference and, along with Mickey Edwards and Tom DeLay, a rival of new House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich.

Even back then, Lewis was old-school. A former insurance salesman, Lewis understood politics from the street-level. He wasn’t a particularly brilliant theoretician, but he was a great practical politician who got into the game to help his constituents. Continue reading →

American Republicans, Democrats

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly and Iconoclast

Angry and frustrated, American voters went to the polls in November 2010 to “take back” their country. Just as they had done in 2008. And 2006. And repeatedly for decades, whether it was Republicans or Democrats from whom they were taking the country back. No matter who was put in charge, things didn’t get better. They won’t this time, either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes.

If we are truly a democracy—if voters get to size up candidates for a public office and choose the one they want—why don’t the elections seem to change anything? Because we elect our leaders, and they then govern, in a system that makes cooperation almost impossible and incivility nearly inevitable, a system in which the campaign season never ends and the struggle for party advantage trumps all other considerations.

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Don’t Blame the Tea Party

 BY MICKEY EDWARDS

 Reprinted from The Atlantic and Iconoclast.

 If the polls are right–and they are remarkably consistent–Democrats will take a drubbing next week, likely losing control of the House and barely holding on to their majority in the Senate. It is possible that such a powerful repudiation will cause them to engage in some serious soul searching and consider whether they have taken the country in a direction the people (it’s their country, after all) don’t want to go.

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Our UnDemocracy

 

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from the Atlantic website

Let us consider how it is that Benjamin Quayle, son of the former vice president, opposed by a majority of Arizona’s Republican voters, will soon be a member of Congress, their opposition notwithstanding.
There is a reassuring myth in American politics that the nation’s policies are set, and its laws written, by men and women who have been selected for those important tasks by majority vote of the citizens they are to represent in Congress.

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No Union Label Here

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

 Reprinted from The Atlantic

 Shakedown? You wanna talk about a real shakedown?

What? You didn’t think Al Capone was around any more? Let me tell you about the SEIU.

Merriam-Webster defines a shakedown as extortion. To “extort” is to obtain one’s money or property by force or intimidation. Herewith, a personal story which (I apologize) requires a bit of context.

After leaving Congress, I was invited to teach at Harvard. At Harvard, one’s ability to teach is gauged by fellow faculty members and administrators (who judged me to have done well enough that I was appointed and reappointed , eventually staying far longer — eleven years — than almost any other non-tenured “practitioner” in the Kennedy School’s history). And by the students (who voted to name me the most outstanding teacher in the school). Then I was invited to teach at Princeton and again did so successfully. I also taught, as a visiting professor, at Georgetown. All in all, more than 15 years of teaching at not-so-shabby places.

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The Politics of Purification Not New

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

Reprinted from Atlantic.com 

            The purification process — hard-core and uncompromising partisans driving heretics from their ranks — has been going on for a long time. 

            The recent Republican convention in Utah, the one in which conservative Senator Robert Bennett was defeated for being not conservative enough (despite an 84 percent approval rating from the American Conservative Union), is just one more step in a decades-long effort to drive independent thought from the political decision making process.

            This year, of course, attention has been focused primarily on Marco Rubio’s success in driving Florida Governor Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party (he’s now running for the Senate as an Independent) and former Congressman Pat Toomey’s success in converting Republican Senator Arlen Specter into a Democrat.  But in both of those cases one can argue that the targeted incumbent was simply too far out of step with his own party. 

            The same ACU ratings index on which Bennett scored an 84 gave Specter a 40.  The ratings only measure members of Congress but Crist had more than once angered party members with his support of initiatives that were fiercely opposed by most Republicans.  But given Bennett’s long embrace of conservative positions, with relatively few departures from the party-line script over a period of nearly two decades, what happened in Utah was something of a very different and disturbing nature.  It was checklist politics, a demand for suspension of judgment and lockstep adherence to an ideological instruction manual that would brook no deviation.
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Choosing the Next Justice

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

  Reprinted from Politico.com

Given the increased focus on, and increased fealty to, one’s political party as an overriding factor in the decision-making process, it is highly likely that every Democratic member of the Senate will feel a strong sense of obligation to confirm the Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic President. 

Add the fact that many members of the Senate, as confused about a Senator’s duties as are most journalists and private citizens, will assume that a President is entitled to have his nominees confirmed absent some overriding disqualification, and the path to Kagan’s confirmation would seem reasonably obstacle-free. 

Republicans would love to have a reason to show that Kagan is a tool of some great socialist plot to undermine democratic values, but they’ve played that card to death and might actually long for a breather from that unending war.  Which suggests that the Solicitor General might want to go shopping for some classy-looking black robes.

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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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An Anniversary Worth Noting Now

BY MICKEY EDWARDS

 (this article was first published on Atlantic.com)

          On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry rose in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia and, aware of the risks inherent in undertaking a rebellion against the British crown, chose the principle upon which he would stand.  “Give me liberty,” he said, “or give me death.” 

          It was not a rhetorical flourish.  Rebellion was treason and the penalty for treason was precisely that: death.  Patrick Henry and his fellow rebels, Washington and Jefferson, the Adamses, Madison and Franklin, in declaring their independence from the British monarch, put everything — their reputations, their possessions, their very lives — on the line for the right to live as free men, governing themselves, no longer bound by distant and arbitrary rule.  Patrick Henry may have been a bit more of a firebrand than some, his speeches a counterpart to Thomas Paine’s writing, but he was merely putting into words the thoughts that ran through Nathan Hale’s head, and George Mason’s, and Benjamin Rush’s.

          Americans today are caught up in conflicts great and small — how much authority to give to government, how to square guaranteed rights with the imperatives of security, how much taxation is too much (even when imposed by one’s own representatives) — but in each case, these are decisions we make, collectively, as we see the need.

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