Mickey Edwards: Difference between revisions
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Latest revision as of 11:12, 6 May 2024
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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 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). 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. Rush Limbaugh calls him a Republican-in-name-only (RINO), for sayingEdwards had observed
ConservatismThe true father of uniquely American conservatism, in his opinion, is Barry Goldwater. It emphasized "free enterprise", but not necessarily corporate profit. While he personally disliked some of the new lifestyles of the 1960s and 1970s, he did not see his role as forcing his moral choices on others. His idealsIn defining the issue, he referred to a 2004 speech by Sarah Bramwell, a conservative writer. [4] Bramwell said that the basic American conservative motivations had been Explaining why he did not attend CPAC in 2010, Edwards disagreed, however, that his kind of conservativism is derived from Europe; he sees European conservatism as emphasizing state power.
Culture warsBramwell, in her 2004 speech cited by Edwards, continued,
As an example of how religious conservatives has altered the more general movement, Edwards mentions that the 1973 founding statement of the Heritage Foundation cited four values: "free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom and a strong national defense." Neither the 1960 Sharon Statement nor the 1964 mission statement of the American Conservative Union mentions "traditional" or "social" issues. The Heritage Foundation, however, added "traditional American values" in 1993.[6] Power versus PrincipleHe 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 Ross 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. In a 2009 op-ed, he wrote that "Loyalty to party undermines the very essence of representative government, which depends on entrusting members of one's community to act in one's stead as an evaluator of legislative policy." Strong political parties, he said, were a fear of James Madison and George Washington, which they saw as harmful in the British system. [7] 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."[8] Law and terrorismHe 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. [9] Presenting the recommendation of the American Society of International Law, he called for the U.S. to join the International Criminal Court. He was joined by William H. Taft, IV, Michael Newton, Patricia McGowan Wald and David Tolbert. Some conservatives, such as Ron Paul and Howard Phillips, consider U.S. involvement with the Court to be a dangerous encroachment on national sovereignty. Edwards responded to concerns that the Court might be used for lawfare, saying “The concern that the court could turn out to be politically motivated and oppose U.S. interest and U.S. actions could happen and that’s why it has been important is to observe the court and observe the way the prosecutors have worked. To this point, there is no indication that these ideas are well founded.”[10] 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. "[11] References
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