Hon. Mickey Edwards

Mickey Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years, serving on the House Budget and Appropriations Committees and as a chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.

After leaving Congress he taught for 11 years at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before moving on first to Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and then back to Washington, DC, as vice president of the Aspen Institute, where he directs a bipartisan fellowship for elected public officials.

Mr. Edwards, who grew up in Oklahoma City, has degrees in both law and journalism.  He began his career as a newspaper editor and reporter and later won awards in advertising and public relations before being elected to Congress.  While teaching at Harvard he returned to journalism as a weekly political columnist for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times and broadcast a weekly commentary on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”.

Mr. Edwards is a board member of both the Constitution Project, where he has chaired task forces on judicial independence and the war power, and the Project on Government Oversight.  He was a member of the American Bar Association’s select task force on the use of presidential signing statements and the American Society of International Law’s task force on the International Criminal Court and has  chaired policy task forces for both the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Among his books are “Reclaiming Conservatism”, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press, and “The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans”, published in 2013 by Yale University Press.  His articles have appeared frequently in publications ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to Daedalus, The Public Interest, and the Atlantic.   He is a frequent public speaker and has been a guest on many of the nation’s leading radio and television news and opinion broadcasts.