Say It Ain't So, Joe
Why Joe Lieberman's attempt to strip terrorists of American citizenship is unconstitutional and violates basic American values. More »
Advertisement
Mickey Edwards spent 16 years in Congress and 16 years teaching at Harvard and Princeton. He is a director of The Constitution Project and wrote Reclaiming Conservatism. More
Mickey Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years and a chairman of the House Republican leadership's policy committee. After leaving Congress, he taught at Harvard for 11 years, where he was voted the Kennedy School's most outstanding teacher, and at Princeton for five years. He currently runs a political leadership program for elected officials as Vice President of the Aspen Institute and teaches defense policy and foreign policy at George Washington University. He has been a weekly columnist for The L.A. Times and The Chicago Tribune and is a weekly commentator on National Public Radio. Edwards served for five years as national chairman of the American Conservative Union and the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He was one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation. In 1980, he directed more than a dozen joint House-Senate policy advisory task forces for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. He is a director of The Constitution Project and has chaired task forces for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution. He served on the American Bar Association task force that condemned President George W. Bush, and his most recent book, Reclaiming Conservatism, was published in 2008.
Why Joe Lieberman's attempt to strip terrorists of American citizenship is unconstitutional and violates basic American values. More »
The April 19, 1995 domestic terrorist attack proves we should temper political our political discussions and quit demonizing the other side as incompatible with America More »
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… More »
Republican congressmen who rallied health care protesters during the debate insulted the dignity of American democracy More »
Steele must prove himself and fire the finance chiefs who cooked up the RNC's leaked fundraising campaign More »
I was asked yesterday whether I would be going to CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which is currently being held a half-hour's walk from my office in D.C. It was a logical question, not only since the meetings are so close at hand but also because for five years I chaired CPAC. CPAC brings together conservative activists from every corner of America. As national chairman of the American Conservative Union, a founding trustee of… More »
If democracy is more about process--how decisions are made and who makes them--than about the policies that result, the United States Senate has become not merely dysfunctional, but an actual threat to the functioning of America's system of government.That threat is exemplified by two features of the Senate's rules: the filibuster and the "hold." While both procedures can serve legitimate and valuable ends, and each has a proper place in the legislative arsenal,… More »
Years ago, the Congress assigned to the President the task of submitting each year a proposed federal budget. It has no force of law--deciding national priorities and spending levels remains strictly a congressional prerogative--but, like the President's State of the Union speech, which is also an assignment he is required (by the Constitution) to meet, it gives a pretty good snapshot of what the government's chief operating officer is thinking. This one may raise… More »
Once a week during his presidency, members of the Republican congressional leadership gathered in the White House Cabinet Room to meet with Ronald Reagan and key members of his administration. Less frequently but still relatively often, Reagan included the Congress's Democratic leaders as well. Discussions were wide-ranging and candid. The President did not stand at a lectern, there was no presidential seal; the President did not use the occasion to promote his… More »
Every other January, members of Congress--all 435 in the House and newly-elected Senators--take an oath of office in which they swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Now it happens that defending the Constitution of the United States entails a fairly serious commitment because that document actually imposes a considerable amount of obligation. Unlike in a court of law, however, there is no actual punishment for swearing falsely when one… More »
Predictably, conservatives and liberals have taken quite different positions on the Supreme Court decision upholding the right of corporations to finance political advertising. To conservatives, the decision (which refused to strike down corporate funding of a political film) was a righteous affirmation of constitutional guarantees of free speech. Liberals saw the Court's ruling as handing the keys of government to greedy corporate fat cats who would use huge… More »
The Massachusetts election is over and the result, a Republican victory, is predictably hurtful to Democrats, whose options for moving legislation forward have been substantially reduced. But that's nothing compared to the damage that will be done to the party if it actually follows through on its repeated threat to use clever manipulation, backroom maneuvering, and legislative gimmickry to negate the by-now clear will of the American people. With health care… More »
It has been interesting--and amusing--to watch the media response to Michael Steele's kick-ass chairmanship of the national Republican Party. An article in Roll Call, typical of the press Steele has been getting, reports on the controversy surrounding Harry Reid and manages, somehow, to tie Steele into the story . . . "which brings us to the GOP's high-profile leader who is unable to escape controversy . . ."The story goes on to say that "Steele seems to match… More »
Guilty.I confess. To those who saw me as--accused me of being--an unrepentant non-PC believer in American "exceptionalism", a (dare I use the word) "patriot", you were right all along. I don't wear a flag pin on my lapel but that's only because I'm not big on adornment (I didn't even have my own campaign bumper sticker on my car); in my heart, though, I wave the flag. And I do so because I (a) love this country, and (b) believe that it is different, better,… More »
Looking back at a significant period of time - a century, a decade - the tendency is to get all Olympian about it, gazing down majestically from the clouds and assessing change, growth, loss -- or if you're of a more sociological bent, trends - with an all-capital-letters kind of PERSPECTIVE. This is why we label passages of time with such names as "The Era of Good Feelings", usually misconstrued by subsequent generations but helpful to textbook writers in… More »
Panelists on one of Politico's web pages (Politico/Arena), were asked recently to answer this question: "Has President Obama moved to the right?" It was a good question, but as I recall I didn't submit a response (I was traveling at the time, but my real excuse was that I didn't quite know how to answer: who decides these days which policies fit into which boxes?).A review was in order: what are the issues dominating the political agenda and who stands where?First… More »
In the short term, it is the legislation currently before Congress that will matter most: how lawmakers change the ways Americans pay for health care; whether the federal government is able to stimulate the creation of new jobs or prevent further losses; how far the U.S. is willing to go in emission-reduction. Each of these issues is contentious and each contemplated action -- or inaction -- will have consequences that are not trivial. So how is it that if one were… More »
