Mickey Edwards
Keynote Speaker: Vice President & Program Director, Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership at The Aspen Institute; Former US Congressman
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Mickey Edwards Biography
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.
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”.
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.
Contact a speaker booking agent to check availability on Mickey Edwards and other top speakers and celebrities.
Mickey Edwards Speaking Topics
The Constitution places almost every major power of the federal government—over war, taxes, spending, treaties, judicial appointments, creating or ending public programs, even determining who may sit in the President’s Cabinet. And yet, Mickey Edwards, a former member of the congressional leadership during 16 years in the House, argues that today’s Congress repeatedly fails to meet its constitutional obligations, criticizing presidential overreaching but doing nothing to assert its own authority as a maker of laws and overseer of the executive branch. If impeachment is to be considered, Edwards argues, maybe it is the Congress that should be impeached.
Mickey Edwards spent most of his congressional career in the field of international affairs as the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, official observer of numerous overseas elections, a contributor to magazines on international affairs, speaker at the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy, advisor to the U.S. State Department under Secretary Colin Powell, and foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Edwards was a leader in Congress’s support for the first Gulf War but has been a frequent critic of America’s seeming insistence on inserting itself into difficulties wherever they occur around the world: not a pacifist and not an isolationist—he has written persuasively for America’s role as a promoter of human rights and liberal democracy and believes the U.S. needs to be more deliberate about when and where it intrudes on the international stage.
Mickey Edwards was a featured speaker at an international humanities conference in Italy and has been a frequent critic of the failure of American schools and universities to adequately teach civics, critical thinking, and the various elements of a humanities curriculum. Edwards argues that our schools, including the best of them, have essentially been turned into vo-tech schools, training Americans for employment—and to be part of the nation’s economic machinery—but not to be thoughtful, knowledgeable citizens, capable of meeting their constitutional responsibilities as final arbiters of government policy.
Nobody has had a better, or more comprehensive, close-up view of American conservatism—and how it has changed—than Mickey Edwards. He was a leader in Barry Goldwater’s grassroots campaign to reshape the Republican Party, national vice chairman for the Young Republicans when they formed the conservative core of the party’s activist base, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, one of three founding trustees of the conservative Heritage Foundation, a conservative staffer for Republican members of Congress, and director of the Reagan presidential campaign’s joint House-Senate policy advisory committees. It was Edwards who hit the campaign trail for Reagan, was with him in his hotel room in New Hampshire when he won that state’s pivotal presidential primary, and later intervened with fellow conservatives to bridge the gap between movement activists and Reagan’s Vice President, and later President, George H. W. Bush. And it was Edwards who helped shape the Republican National Convention platform for the Reagan campaign.
But what conservatism was then and what it is now are very different animals. As Edwards wrote in his book, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back, published by Oxford University Press, people who call themselves conservatives today support positions that earlier conservatives would have marched on Washington to protest, including government surveillance of citizens and defense of corporate abuse (earlier conservatives championed small business and market competition). In his devastating critique, Edwards cites dramatic changes in Republican Party platforms as the party and its conservative movement have begun more and more to represent the antithesis of what they once stood for. Neither Goldwater, conservative’s 1964 choice for President, nor Reagan, their choice in 1980, could win a Republican primary today, Edwards claims. As for himself, he points to a study by a political science professor who found that Edwards, once chairman of the American Conservative Union, with a 100 percent conservative rating, and one of the most conservative members of Congress for 16 years, would be one of the more liberal Republicans in Congress today if he voted exactly the same way.
But Edwards does not know modern conservatism only through an activist lens. When he left Congress after 16 years, during which he was an acknowledged conservative leader, he continued to write from a conservative viewpoint in weekly newspaper columns in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Herald, and in a weekly broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered (his Los Angeles column was entitled “On the Right”). At the same time, he introduced a new class on American conservatism at Harvard, where he had begun a teaching career that lasted 16 years at Harvard, Princeton, George Washington University and Georgetown. The course examined every aspect of American conservatism (distinguishing it from European and Asian conservatism; American conservatism at its root was originally similar to the European liberalism of John Locke, with its emphasis on individual rights and freedoms). Edwards taught about conservatism by looking at both policy and theory, introducing students to the work of Hayek, Von Mises, Friedman, Churchill, Burke, Buckley, Kirk, Irving Kristol, and other voices of the early conservative movement.
The heart of Edwards’ argument is that what passes for conservatism today is not that at all, but a hodgepodge of big government and anti-government, liberty and state control, populism and elitism, limited government and military adventurism. It is an argument he has taken all over the country, on campuses, through the airwaves, and in newspaper and magazine articles. It is not an attack on conservative ideas but an attempt to reclaim them and to recapture the title from those who have usurped the name of the movement without even a rudimentary understanding of its principles.
Fierce, articulate and nonpartisan in his judgments, Mickey Edwards is one of the nation’s best-known defenders of the Constitution, protesting unconstitutional expansions of federal and presidential power (regardless of which political party is guilty), criticizing practices by police and prosecutors that limit a citizen’s access to justice, and arguing against federal and local government targeting of American citizens with far-reaching surveillance activities. A board member of both The Constitution Project and the Project on Government Oversight and co-chair of a task force on privacy and security, he played a central role in an MSNBC special debating the NSA’s surveillance programs, was part of a select American Bar Association task force investigating presidential claims of the authority to bypass federal law, a key member of the American Society for International Law’s task force on limits to the authority of the International Criminal Court and co-chairman of a high-level Constitution Project task force on the war power. As a member of Congress for 16 years, he fought vigorously against well-intended reforms that violated fundamental tenets of the Constitution and pressed his congressional colleagues to meet the responsibilities the Constitution had placed on them.
A former professor at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and the University of Maryland Law School, Edwards has defended the Constitution at law schools, public policy schools and at public events in every part of the country and in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles.
Mickey Edwards Videos
How to book Mickey Edwards?
Our booking agents have successfully helped clients around the world secure talent like Mickey Edwards for speaking engagements, personal appearances, product endorsements, or corporate entertainment for over 15 years. The team at All American Entertainment represents and listens to the needs of organizations and corporations seeking to hire keynote speakers, celebrities or entertainers. Fill out a booking request form for Mickey Edwards, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to discuss your upcoming event. One of our experienced agents will be happy to help you get pricing information and check availability for Mickey Edwards or any other celebrity of your choice.
How much does it cost to book Mickey Edwards?
Booking fees for Mickey Edwards, or any other speakers and celebrities, are determined based on a number of factors and may change without notice. Pricing often varies according to the circumstances, including the talent's schedule, market conditions, length of presentation, and the location of the event. Speaker fees listed on this website are intended to serve as a guideline only. In some cases, the actual quote may be above or below the stated range. For the most current fee to hire Mickey Edwards, please fill out the booking request form or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to speak with an experienced booking agent.
Who is the agent for Mickey Edwards?
All American Entertainment has successfully secured celebrity talent like Mickey Edwards for clients worldwide for more than 15 years. As a full-service talent booking agency, we have access to virtually any speaker or celebrity in the world. Our agents are happy and able to submit an offer to the speaker or celebrity of your choice, letting you benefit from our reputation and long-standing relationships in the industry. Fill out the booking request form or call our office at 1.800.698.2536, and one of our agents will assist you to book Mickey Edwards for your next private or corporate function.
What is a full-service talent booking agency?
All American Speakers is a "buyers agent" and exclusively represents talent buyers, meeting planners and event professionals, who are looking to secure celebrities and speakers for personal appearances, speaking engagements, corporate entertainment, public relations campaigns, commercials, or endorsements. We do not exclusively represent Mickey Edwards or claim ourselves as the exclusive booking agency, business manager, publicist, speakers bureau or management for Mickey Edwards or any other speaker or celebrity on this website. For more information on how we work and what makes us unique, please read the AAE Advantage.
Mickey Edwards is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics including Finance, Economy and Authors. The estimated speaking fee range to book Mickey Edwards for live events is $10,000 - $20,000, and for virtual events $10,000 - $20,000. Mickey Edwards generally travels from Washington, DC, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Joseph Stiglitz, Daniel Altman and Robert Bryce. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Mickey Edwards for an upcoming event.
SPEAKING TOPICS
Mickey Edwards Speaking Topics
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THE ABSENT CONGRESS
The Constitution places almost every major power of the federal government—over war, taxes, spending, treaties, judicial appointments, creating or ending public programs, even determining who may sit in the President’s Cabinet. And yet, Mickey Edwards, a former member of the congressional leadership during 16 years in the House, argues that today’s Congress repeatedly fails to meet its constitutional obligations, criticizing presidential overreaching but doing nothing to assert its own authority as a maker of laws and overseer of the executive branch. If impeachment is to be considered, Edwards argues, maybe it is the Congress that should be impeached.
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CREATING A RESPONSIBLE FOREIGN POLICY
Mickey Edwards spent most of his congressional career in the field of international affairs as the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, official observer of numerous overseas elections, a contributor to magazines on international affairs, speaker at the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy, advisor to the U.S. State Department under Secretary Colin Powell, and foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Edwards was a leader in Congress’s support for the first Gulf War but has been a frequent critic of America’s seeming insistence on inserting itself into difficulties wherever they occur around the world: not a pacifist and not an isolationist—he has written persuasively for America’s role as a promoter of human rights and liberal democracy and believes the U.S. needs to be more deliberate about when and where it intrudes on the international stage.
-
EDUCATING CITIZENS TO BE CITIZENS
Mickey Edwards was a featured speaker at an international humanities conference in Italy and has been a frequent critic of the failure of American schools and universities to adequately teach civics, critical thinking, and the various elements of a humanities curriculum. Edwards argues that our schools, including the best of them, have essentially been turned into vo-tech schools, training Americans for employment—and to be part of the nation’s economic machinery—but not to be thoughtful, knowledgeable citizens, capable of meeting their constitutional responsibilities as final arbiters of government policy.
-
RECLAIMING CONSERVATISM
Nobody has had a better, or more comprehensive, close-up view of American conservatism—and how it has changed—than Mickey Edwards. He was a leader in Barry Goldwater’s grassroots campaign to reshape the Republican Party, national vice chairman for the Young Republicans when they formed the conservative core of the party’s activist base, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference, one of three founding trustees of the conservative Heritage Foundation, a conservative staffer for Republican members of Congress, and director of the Reagan presidential campaign’s joint House-Senate policy advisory committees. It was Edwards who hit the campaign trail for Reagan, was with him in his hotel room in New Hampshire when he won that state’s pivotal presidential primary, and later intervened with fellow conservatives to bridge the gap between movement activists and Reagan’s Vice President, and later President, George H. W. Bush. And it was Edwards who helped shape the Republican National Convention platform for the Reagan campaign.
But what conservatism was then and what it is now are very different animals. As Edwards wrote in his book, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back, published by Oxford University Press, people who call themselves conservatives today support positions that earlier conservatives would have marched on Washington to protest, including government surveillance of citizens and defense of corporate abuse (earlier conservatives championed small business and market competition). In his devastating critique, Edwards cites dramatic changes in Republican Party platforms as the party and its conservative movement have begun more and more to represent the antithesis of what they once stood for. Neither Goldwater, conservative’s 1964 choice for President, nor Reagan, their choice in 1980, could win a Republican primary today, Edwards claims. As for himself, he points to a study by a political science professor who found that Edwards, once chairman of the American Conservative Union, with a 100 percent conservative rating, and one of the most conservative members of Congress for 16 years, would be one of the more liberal Republicans in Congress today if he voted exactly the same way.
But Edwards does not know modern conservatism only through an activist lens. When he left Congress after 16 years, during which he was an acknowledged conservative leader, he continued to write from a conservative viewpoint in weekly newspaper columns in The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Boston Herald, and in a weekly broadcast on NPR’s All Things Considered (his Los Angeles column was entitled “On the Right”). At the same time, he introduced a new class on American conservatism at Harvard, where he had begun a teaching career that lasted 16 years at Harvard, Princeton, George Washington University and Georgetown. The course examined every aspect of American conservatism (distinguishing it from European and Asian conservatism; American conservatism at its root was originally similar to the European liberalism of John Locke, with its emphasis on individual rights and freedoms). Edwards taught about conservatism by looking at both policy and theory, introducing students to the work of Hayek, Von Mises, Friedman, Churchill, Burke, Buckley, Kirk, Irving Kristol, and other voices of the early conservative movement.
The heart of Edwards’ argument is that what passes for conservatism today is not that at all, but a hodgepodge of big government and anti-government, liberty and state control, populism and elitism, limited government and military adventurism. It is an argument he has taken all over the country, on campuses, through the airwaves, and in newspaper and magazine articles. It is not an attack on conservative ideas but an attempt to reclaim them and to recapture the title from those who have usurped the name of the movement without even a rudimentary understanding of its principles.
-
DOES THE CONSTITUTION STILL MATTER? AMERICANS AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE
Fierce, articulate and nonpartisan in his judgments, Mickey Edwards is one of the nation’s best-known defenders of the Constitution, protesting unconstitutional expansions of federal and presidential power (regardless of which political party is guilty), criticizing practices by police and prosecutors that limit a citizen’s access to justice, and arguing against federal and local government targeting of American citizens with far-reaching surveillance activities. A board member of both The Constitution Project and the Project on Government Oversight and co-chair of a task force on privacy and security, he played a central role in an MSNBC special debating the NSA’s surveillance programs, was part of a select American Bar Association task force investigating presidential claims of the authority to bypass federal law, a key member of the American Society for International Law’s task force on limits to the authority of the International Criminal Court and co-chairman of a high-level Constitution Project task force on the war power. As a member of Congress for 16 years, he fought vigorously against well-intended reforms that violated fundamental tenets of the Constitution and pressed his congressional colleagues to meet the responsibilities the Constitution had placed on them.
A former professor at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown and the University of Maryland Law School, Edwards has defended the Constitution at law schools, public policy schools and at public events in every part of the country and in dozens of newspaper and magazine articles.
VIDEO
Mickey Edwards Videos
BOOKS
NEWS
Mickey Edwards News
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Mickey Edwards on how to fix Congress - The Reliable Source - The ...
Mickey Edwards at his book party last week. (Gia Regan) Why is it always the members who have already left Congress who have the big ideas for how to fix ...
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Fmr. Congressman Mickey Edwards appointed National Constitution ...
The National Constitution Center and University of Pennsylvania Law School have appointed former Congressman, author and Vice President ...
FAQ
How to book Mickey Edwards?
Our booking agents have successfully helped clients around the world secure talent like Mickey Edwards for speaking engagements, personal appearances, product endorsements, or corporate entertainment for over 15 years. The team at All American Entertainment represents and listens to the needs of organizations and corporations seeking to hire keynote speakers, celebrities or entertainers. Fill out a booking request form for Mickey Edwards, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to discuss your upcoming event. One of our experienced agents will be happy to help you get pricing information and check availability for Mickey Edwards or any other celebrity of your choice.
How much does it cost to book Mickey Edwards?
Booking fees for Mickey Edwards, or any other speakers and celebrities, are determined based on a number of factors and may change without notice. Pricing often varies according to the circumstances, including the talent's schedule, market conditions, length of presentation, and the location of the event. Speaker fees listed on this website are intended to serve as a guideline only. In some cases, the actual quote may be above or below the stated range. For the most current fee to hire Mickey Edwards, please fill out the booking request form or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to speak with an experienced booking agent.
Who is the agent for Mickey Edwards?
All American Entertainment has successfully secured celebrity talent like Mickey Edwards for clients worldwide for more than 15 years. As a full-service talent booking agency, we have access to virtually any speaker or celebrity in the world. Our agents are happy and able to submit an offer to the speaker or celebrity of your choice, letting you benefit from our reputation and long-standing relationships in the industry. Fill out the booking request form or call our office at 1.800.698.2536, and one of our agents will assist you to book Mickey Edwards for your next private or corporate function.
What is a full-service talent booking agency?
All American Speakers is a "buyers agent" and exclusively represents talent buyers, meeting planners and event professionals, who are looking to secure celebrities and speakers for personal appearances, speaking engagements, corporate entertainment, public relations campaigns, commercials, or endorsements. We do not exclusively represent Mickey Edwards or claim ourselves as the exclusive booking agency, business manager, publicist, speakers bureau or management for Mickey Edwards or any other speaker or celebrity on this website. For more information on how we work and what makes us unique, please read the AAE Advantage.
Mickey Edwards is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics including Finance, Economy and Authors. The estimated speaking fee range to book Mickey Edwards for live events is $10,000 - $20,000, and for virtual events $10,000 - $20,000. Mickey Edwards generally travels from Washington, DC, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Joseph Stiglitz, Daniel Altman and Robert Bryce. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Mickey Edwards for an upcoming event.
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