Edwards invokes halcyon age of GOP

Author: Jaime Fuller

Former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards gave the Rohatyn Center International Studies Colloquium lecture Sept. 26. The lecture, titled, "Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost­ - And How It can Find Its Way Back," was part of an effort by the College to advance global understanding through co-curricular programming.

Edwards, besides being a former congressman from Oklahoma, is an expert at the think tank The Aspen Institute, a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University, a former professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and former national chairman of the American Conservative Union. Despite his long ties with conservatism and his claim that he is one of its founders, Edwards' lecture focused on how "some things were starting to bother [him] about [his] own party."

"I never thought I'd see the day when the United States would declare the right to commit crimes of torture that we condemned other countries for doing," Edwards said, citing an example of the current administration's policies towards the writ of habeas corpus and the treatment of prisoners of war.

Before making scathing criticisms of the Bush administration however, Edwards felt he had to defend his conservative principles.

"Because a couple of my remarks are going to sound aimed towards Republicans … let's just get a couple of things on the table," he said. "I ain't a lefty."

Edwards' main problem with the modern Republican Party is that "many people who proclaim themselves as conservative have become the enemies of the very things we used to fight for." Edwards defined conservatism as a movement that hoped to secure the rights of the people by adhering to the Constitution.

"Democracy," he said, "is the ability to put differing opinions on the table and vigorously debate them."

He then recalled the country's founding fathers and one of his heroes, James Madison, to illustrate how the Bill of Rights can be misinterpreted and actually take liberty away from the people.

"[James Madison, Patrick Henry and others] opposed the Bill of Rights, because they said, 'You know what, if you make the mistake of spelling out rights and undermining them, some idiot in the twentieth century is going to come along and say, 'That's all the rights you have,"' he said. "And that idiot was Robert Bork."

Edwards said that the Republican Party has changed so much that the public today wouldn't recognize the party platform of thirty years ago as being even remotely conservative. He listed the Equal Rights Amendment, the demand for representation in the House for the District of Columbia and "peace through strength" as some of the major policy goals of the Republican Party of his heyday. But he was not short of criticism when talking about the choices of the Republican leaders of today.

"We never would have supported preventive war like we have now," he said.

The one theme he kept returning to throughout the lecture was the importance of the Constitution as "the supreme law of the land" and how the different branches of government were blending together along partisan lines. He reprimanded his friend and fellow Oklahoma representative Tom Cole, who said, "It's not for me to second-guess the President of the United States."

Edwards retorted, "That is precisely the job of Congress and the separate branches of power."

At the end of the lecture, the audience turned his attention to the election, and whether policy should affect voter's choice of candidate.

"This focus on policy positions is silly because they don't decide," he said. "Presidents can want all they want, and it doesn't happen."

The final point brought up in the question and answer session was the financial meltdown, and questions were asked concerning Edwards' opinion of the bailout. "The idea that a president would send, with this kind of crisis, a three-page bill that doesn't provide accountability or protection of the governments interests-it's unbelievable," he said. "I would have flunked a student who submitted a paper like that bill."

His rationale was that "if it's urgent, it's also important. If it's important, it's necessary to take the time to do it right."

He explained at the beginning of the lecture that he found fault with the book title, "Reclaiming Conservatism," because he did not seek to reclaim conservatism as much as he wished to reclaim the Constitution and public liberty. But his statements against the party, like "Every single thing this administration has done is wrong," seem to intimate he wouldn't mind taking back the mantle of the political ideology he helped formulate either.

"We need to take the Republican Party back from alien forces," he said.