September 16, 2024

Whatever Happened to the Congressional Role in Shaping Bipartisan Foreign Policy

Mickey Edwards represented Oklahoma in Congress for 16 years, serving as a senior member of
the House Republican leadership (chairman of the party’s policy committee), a member of both
the House Budget and Appropriations committees, and ranking member of the House
subcommittee on Foreign Operations.

After leaving Congress, Edwards was invited to join the Harvard faculty, where he remained for
eleven years, selected by students as the Kennedy School of Government’s most outstanding
teacher, teaching courses on foreign policy, Congress, political theory, and legislative process (at Harvard Law School). When his colleague Anne-Marie Slaughter was named dean of the Wilson
school of public and international affairs at Princeton, she asked Edwards to join her there.

After just one year at Princeton, Walter Isaacson, then the President of the Aspen Institute, asked
Edwards to return to Washington as the Institute’s vice president to create a bipartisan leadership
program for young, emerging political leaders. The program he created – a three-seminar, 60-
hour immersion in philosophy, psychology, and public leadership – includes among its graduates
Vice President Kamala Harris (who entered the program when she was a local district attorney in
San Francisco), several who eventually became Cabinet members (including, currently,
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo), and a
number of prominent Oklahoma political leaders, including Congresswoman Stephanie Bice,
Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum and Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt.

Edwards retired from the Aspen Institute in 2019 and returned to teaching at Princeton as a
visiting professor, retiring from teaching two months ago but remaining as director of
congressional and constitutional initiatives, including one he has created to restore to Congress
constitutional powers usurped by or ceded to the executive branch. The initiative, which involves
three dozen scholars, from 19 universities, has presented its proposals to more than 40 members
of Congress to this point.

Foreign policy has been Edwards’ primary focus since his first days in Congress. During the
presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Edwards focused on events in Central
America, visiting every country in the region multiple times, meeting with national leaders,
church leaders, union leaders, and ordinary citizens in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa
Rica, and Honduras. He was a special guest of Violetta Chamorro at her inauguration as
President of Nicaragua and received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Costa
Rica, where he was introduced by President and Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias, with whom
Edwards had formed a personal relationship.

At home, Edwards was named the first president of the U.S. Global Strategy Council, appointed
an advisor to the State Department by Secretary Colin Powell, a member of the U.S. delegation
to the United Nations, chaired two Council on Foreign Relations task forces and served on the
American Bar Association special task force on the use of Presidential Signing Statements. He
was part of the U.S. delegation that met with Saudi Arabia’s king and advisors after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, and part of a delegation to the Soviet Union to meet with members of the Duma,
editors of Izvestia, and pro-democracy activists.

Edwards is the author of four books (most recently, The Parties Versus The People, (Yale
University Press); and Reclaiming Conservatism, (Oxford University Press), and co-author of
Congress: The First Branch, (Oxford University Press). He has been a weekly political
columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Herald, and a solo political
commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered”.

He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.