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Former Oklahoma Congressman Mickey Edwards on the state of American politics and discourse

Gia Regan
/
Yale University Press

Mickey Edwards represented Oklahoma in Congress from 1977 until 1993. A lifelong Republican, Edwards was a founding trustee of The Heritage Foundation and served as chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Now he’s a professor at Princeton University, and the author of multiple books on democracy, Congress, and political party systems. He’s also now an Independent. Edwards sat down with KGOU’s Logan Layden during a recent trip back to Oklahoma.

TRANSCRIPT:

LAYDEN: I just saw you address a political science class. What was your message to these young people?

EDWARDS: You know, forget allegiance to political parties. Don’t get swept up into “I belong to Team A, therefore I have to hate Team B.” Make your independent choices about candidates. And listen to them. Listen to what they’re actually saying. It’s not, like, “OK, well, I’m registered as a Republican, therefore whatever the Republicans say to do I will do.” That’s turning off your brain.

LAYDEN: When you were in Congress… Politics has always been rough and tumble. It’s a fight. How was it when you were there? Have you seen a change? It seems worse now than 20, 30, 40 years ago.

EDWARDS: It was nothing like this. The congressman in the 6th District was a Democrat. And he and I would have dinner together, we’d play golf together. We became good friends. Our two offices — Democrat office, Republican office — had created a joint softball team that we called the Bipartisan Boomers. And the voters themselves, you might have been a Democrat or a Republican, but you didn’t hate the other ones. They were your friends. You saw things a little bit differently. There has been a lot more anger that has generated over the last few decades, but it has really been brought to life by Donald Trump. You know, it is by his lies, by his insults. He has forced people into a position of saying “if you’re not for me, you’re evil.”

LAYDEN: You’ve always been pretty independently minded, even while you were in office, but it was Trump that did it for you as a Republican.

EDWARDS: Yeah, I left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump. I actually cannot conceive of how anybody could vote for somebody who is so obviously limited in not only his ability to think, but his willingness to follow the norms of decency. But it’s — even when Ronald Reagan was president, I was — I ran his policy task forces in his 1980 presidential campaign. I traveled with him. We spent a lot of time together. I met with him every week. But a lot of times there were proposals he made that I didn’t agree with and I voted against him. That’s gone now, the idea that you would actually vote differently than your party leader wants you to vote. So that really drove me out of parties altogether.

LAYDEN: I wanted to ask you about January 6th, and the role that played in your point of view on the current state of our politics and discourse. Like others who served in that building, the U.S. Capitol, you must have an emotional attachment to that place and what it represents. Take us back to how you felt as you experienced that day.

EDWARDS: January 6th unnerved me more than anything ever has because the United States Congress, the lawmaking branch of our government, was under attack. The people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were no more than an enemy army. Now they’re American citizens, but they attacked America. So, if the Russians had come, or if Iran had come, or China had people attacking the U.S. Capitol and breaking it down and threatening to hang the Vice President of the United States and kill the Speaker of the House, we would go to war against them. And this nonsense that this was patriotic, that these were good people. You know, they were traitors. This was an act of treason.

Former Oklahoma Congressman Mickey Edwards was in Oklahoma to talk to students at Oklahoma City Community college and deliver the keynote address at The Oklahoma Academy’s 2024 Town Hall in Tulsa. This interview was edited for time.

Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. Logan spent six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017.
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