Mickey Edwards

Mickey Edwards is Director of the Constitution Project, Vice President of the Aspen Institute teaching a course for elected officials, and a faculty member at George Washington University. He wrote Reclaiming Conservatism and focuses on conservative renewal. After leaving Congress, he was on the faculty at Harvard University and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.

From 1977 to 1993, he was in U.S. House of Representatives, (R-Oklahoma) and Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee (1989-1993).

Conservatism

He was a founder of the Heritage Foundation, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, and chaired the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for five years. Explaining why he did not attend CPAC in 2010,

...truth be told, most of the folks there wouldn't want me there. They wouldn't think I'm a conservative; many wouldn't think Barry Goldwater was a conservative; many, had this been three decades ago, might have been seeking a "true" conservative to run against Ronald Reagan. I don't begrudge these activists their views and they are entitled to use the term "conservative" to describe themselves if they so choose. But the views many of them profess have little in common with the distinctly American kind of conservatism that gave birth to CPAC and the modern American conservative movement. Instead, what many of today's self-proclaimed "conservatives" proclaim is an ideology borrowed from what Donald Rumsfeld famously dismissed as "old Europe."

Edwards disagreed, however, that his kind of conservativism is derived from Europe; he sees European conservatism as emphasizing state power.

Today there are few things that set a "conservatives'" teeth on edge more than a defense of "civil liberties;" yet that is what American conservatism was all about--protecting the liberties of the people. It was a system designed to protect the people from an over-reaching government, not to protect the government from the people. American constitutionalism was a historical high-point in recognizing individual worth. Stop at CPAC today and you will find rooms full of ardent, zealous, fervent young men and women who believe the government should be allowed to torture (we condemned people at Nuremberg for doing that), who believe the government should be able to lock people up without charges and hold them indefinitely (something Henry VIII agreed was a proper exercise of government authority). Who believe the government should be able to read a citizen's mail and listen in on a citizen's phone calls, all without a warrant (the Constitution of course prohibits searches without a warrant, but nobody cares less about the Constitution than some of today's ersatz conservatives).

I'm not at CPAC because I believe in America. I believe in liberty. I believe that governments should be held in check. I believe people matter. I believe in the flag not because of its shape or color but because of the principles it stands for--the principles in the Constitution, the principles repeated and underlined and highlighted and boldfaced and italicized in the Bill of Rights. The George W. whose presidency and precedents I admire was the first president, not the 43d. It is James Madison I admire, not John Yoo. Thomas Paine, not Glenn Beck. Jefferson, not Limbaugh.

Ronald Reagan would not have been welcome at today's CPAC or a tea party rally, but he would not have wanted to be there, either. Neither do I.

He is among the Republicans that see the party as a victim of its own electoral sense, losing its classic conservative principles in the interest of winning elections. In a discussion with Bill Moyers and Russ Douthat, they observed that while Newt Gingrich had originally tried to return power to Congress, Gingrich began the change by making the Republican majority regard the President as less of the leader of a separate branch of government and more of a "team captain". The effect was to turn Congress, in a non-Parliamentary system, into something closer to a Parliamentary majority party.

Edwards disagreed that conservatism automatically means small government. "It's limited government, but that doesn't necessarily mean small. It means that there are areas that you cannot take government into. There are there are areas where the rights of the people are paramount."

Law and terrorism

He signed the "Beyond Guantanamo" petition, and called for a "truth commission", modeled after the Rockefeller and Church committees that investigated Central Intelligence Agency abuses in the 1970s.

In 2010, in The Atlantic, he reflected on his essays as a student on the subject of "What America Means to Me." Commenting on the Keep America Safe's "Al-Qaeda Seven" campaign, he said, of William Kristol and Liz Cheney, that "They insult generations of American conservatives by having the gall to call themselves conservatives; they are statists, pure and simple, dismissive of law, dismissive of the Constitution, dismissive of freedoms..."

"What might Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol say in such an essay? They do not love America; they do not love its values or the very fundamental principles that set it apart. They love power, not freedom (even the neocons, in whose ranks they profess to serve, would be shocked by their disdain for democracy and liberty). When we are in a particularly puckish mood, some of us who are conservatives say that liberals really want to turn America into France. I will say this for Cheney and Kristol: they do not want to turn America into France. They want to turn it into China. "