"Mickey Edwards Urges Congress, Before Party Affiliation Be 'an American First'" PBS Newshour 8/21/2012
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Mickey Edwards, former Republican congressman, rails against political division in Washington in his new book, "The Parties Versus the People." Edwards talks to Judy Woodruff about his suggestions to reform party hostility and create "one congress serving one country."
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): And we continue our series of book conversations exploring ways to bridge ideological divides in Washington.
Judy Woodruff has that.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Has bitter partisanship been seeping into our political culture?
Well, that's what former congressman Mickey Edwards thinks. The Republican served 16 years in the House representing the Fifth District of Oklahoma. In his new book, "The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans," Edwards outlines a shift he witnessed while in Washington. He also shares his ideas for solving the problem.
Edwards, the vice president of the Aspen Institute, joins us now.
Significant excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you start out by asking what would happen if the dead could have nightmares.
(LAUGHTER)
MICKEY EDWARDS, author, "The Parties Versus the People": You're right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you were thinking of a particular founding father?
MICKEY EDWARDS: I was thinking of four of them.
You know, the one thing that George Washington, John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson all agreed on was don't create political parties. And the parties they had in that day were things where a few people got together on three issues, four issues, five issues, but not like what we have today, permanent factions, Republicans, Democrats always on opposite sides. and the founders all warned against that.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what you write here is that the real culprits are the parties.
MICKEY EDWARDS: Right.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you describe them as private clubs. What has happened to the parties?
MICKEY EDWARDS: Well, what happens is they over time got to be where they're in control of who gets to be on the ballot. So they have closed party primaries, where a small segment of the electorate gets to decide who is the most pure candidate they have got.
JUDY WOODRUFF: In each state.
MICKEY EDWARDS: In each state.
And then what happens is, because of sore loser laws that they got passed in most states, the person who lost the primary can't be on the ballot in November, even though that may be the choice of most of the voters in the state. And so you end up with candidates who are not really representative. There are hard-liners, non-compromisers, and they're the people that eventually go to Washington.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you write about the problem being with the elections, but you also write about the problem in the Congress and even in the White House.
MICKEY EDWARDS: It's in both of them.
But it's also even -- one of the things, the state legislatures control congressional districts through the parties. And so, I'm a city guy, you know, from Oklahoma City. I ended up representing wheat farmers and cattle ranchers. I couldn't be an articulate voice for them because the parties, for their own advantage, drew these district lines.
You get to Washington and you get sworn in as a member of Congress, and the American Congress, the United States Congress.
But you're told in order to get a committee assignment that you have to promise you're going to stick with the party line in order for us to put you on that -- and so, nobody wants to compromise. Nobody wants to listen to ideas that didn't come from their own club.
And that's why we have stalemate on everything.
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