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Mickey Edwards

Professor, Princeton University; Author, "The Parties Versus the People"; Former US Congressman

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Mickey Edwards Biography

Mickey Edwards is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma's 5th district, serving from January 3, 1977, to January 3, 1993. He also held the position of Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee during the last four of those years. With a background in Journalism and Law, having earned a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and a J.D. from Oklahoma City University School of Law, Edwards has been a regular commentator for NPR's All Things Considered and has penned columns for a range of leading newspapers.

Aside from his political career, Edwards has held several academic appointments, teaching at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, and Princeton University, among others. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University. His academic contributions extend beyond teaching, having authored numerous books and articles on a variety of topics. His published books include "Reclaiming Conservatism," "The Parties Versus the People," and the co-authored "Congress: The First Branch." Edwards was one of the three founding trustees of The Heritage Foundation and served as the national chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Edwards' diverse experience includes his past service as Vice President of the Aspen Institute and Director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. He has also graced many college campuses as a public speaker, including institutions such as Boston College, Tulane University, and the University of Notre Dame. Despite leaving the Republican Party in the wake of the storming of the United States Capitol, Edwards continues to be an influential voice in American politics, leveraging his vast experience in public service, academia, and journalism.

Speaking Topics
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • FIXING AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICAL SYSTEM

    Mickey Edwards has been a part of—and a student of—America’s political system, first from the outside, as a partisan party leader and conservative political activist; then, from deep within the system itself, as a senior member of Congress, a member of the congressional leadership and an advisor to Presidents, and then from the outside again, as an award-winning lecturer at Harvard and Princeton, a political columnist and broadcaster, and a mentor to a new generation of public officeholders. It has been a unique vantage point, one matched by no other observer of American politics, and that combination of perspectives has led to a series of breathtaking proposals not to replace one party with another, or replace some officials with others, but to change the entire political system from top to bottom, creating a system that recaptures what America’s founders intended: a government in which the voice of the people is actually heard; a system in which, within the bounds of the Constitution, the people themselves control the levers of government.

    What Edwards proposes is a far-reaching change in how campaigns are funded, eradicating the ability of political insiders to limit voters’ choices by controlling who can be on the ballot, and depriving parties of the right to shape congressional districts for their own advantage, undermining the Founders’ vision of truly representative government.

    Edwards’ proposals have stirred a national political movement through his book, The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, a movement that has been fueled by groundbreaking articles in The Atlantic, Daedalus, The New York Times, and other major publications. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in an editorial: “The man widely credited with helping the open primary proposal gain steam nationally is former Rep. Mickey Edwards ... who advocated for both redistricting and primary reform in his 2012 book ... This should be Missouri’s future ... Neither major political party likes these ideas. Why? It takes the primaries out of their hands and puts the power where it belongs, with the people.”

    Edwards’ arguments have changed the national debate about the extreme control political parties exercise over our political system—arguments heard on television broadcasts as diverse as Charlie Rose, the PBS NewsHour and Bill Moyers, and on outlets ranging from CNN and NPR to MSNBC and Al Jazeera, and before audiences ranging from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to trade associations and from labor unions to college campuses.

Videos
Books
The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans

The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans

Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back

Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back

News
FAQs
  • How do I book Mickey Edwards to speak at my event?

    Our experienced booking agents have successfully helped clients around the world secure speakers like Mickey Edwards for speaking engagements, personal appearances, product endorsements, or corporate entertainment since 2002. Click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page to check availability 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 speaking fee information and check availability for Mickey Edwards or any other speaker of your choice.
  • What are the speaker fees for Mickey Edwards

    Speaking fees for Mickey Edwards, or any other speakers and celebrities, are determined based on a number of factors and may change without notice. The estimated fees to book Mickey Edwards are $10,000 - $20,000 for live events and $10,000 - $20,000 for virtual events. For the most current speaking fee to hire Mickey Edwards, click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to speak directly with an experienced booking agent.
  • What topics does Mickey Edwards speak about?

  • Where does Mickey Edwards travel from?

    Mickey Edwards generally travels from Washington, DC, USA, but can be booked for private corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. For more details, please contact an AAE Booking agent.
  • Who is Mickey Edwards’s agent?

    AAE Speakers Bureau has successfully booked keynote speakers like Mickey Edwards for clients worldwide since 2002. As a full-service speaker 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. Please click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page including the details of your event, 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 speaker booking agency?

    AAE Speakers Bureau is a full-service speaker booking agency, meaning we can completely manage the speaker’s or celebrity’s engagement with your organization from the time of booking your speaker through the event’s completion. We provide all of the services you need to host Mickey Edwards or any other speaker of your choice, including offer negotiation, contractual assistance, accounting and billing, and event speaker travel and logistics services. When you book a speaker with us, we manage the process of hosting a speaker for you as an extension of your team. Our goal is to give our clients peace of mind and a best-in-class service experience when booking a speaker with us.
  • Why is AAE Speakers Bureau different from other booking agencies?

    If you’re looking for the best, unbiased speaker recommendations, paired with a top-notch customer service experience, you’re in the right place. At AAE Speakers Bureau, we exclusively represent the interests of our clients - professional organizations, companies, universities, and associations. We intentionally do not represent the speakers we feature or book. That is so we can present our clients with the broadest and best performing set of speaker options in the market today, and we can make these recommendations without any obligation to promote a specific speaker over another. This is why when our agents suggest a speaker for your event, you can be assured that they are of the highest quality with a history of proven success with our other clients.
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Professor, Princeton University; Author, "The Parties Versus the People"; Former US Congressman

Travels From:
Washington, DC, USA
Speaking Fee:

Mickey Edwards Biography

Mickey Edwards is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma's 5th district, serving from January 3, 1977, to January 3, 1993. He also held the position of Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee during the last four of those years. With a background in Journalism and Law, having earned a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and a J.D. from Oklahoma City University School of Law, Edwards has been a regular commentator for NPR's All Things Considered and has penned columns for a range of leading newspapers.

Aside from his political career, Edwards has held several academic appointments, teaching at Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, and Princeton University, among others. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University. His academic contributions extend beyond teaching, having authored numerous books and articles on a variety of topics. His published books include "Reclaiming Conservatism," "The Parties Versus the People," and the co-authored "Congress: The First Branch." Edwards was one of the three founding trustees of The Heritage Foundation and served as the national chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Edwards' diverse experience includes his past service as Vice President of the Aspen Institute and Director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership. He has also graced many college campuses as a public speaker, including institutions such as Boston College, Tulane University, and the University of Notre Dame. Despite leaving the Republican Party in the wake of the storming of the United States Capitol, Edwards continues to be an influential voice in American politics, leveraging his vast experience in public service, academia, and journalism.

Mickey Edwards Speaking Topics

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • FIXING AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICAL SYSTEM

    Mickey Edwards has been a part of—and a student of—America’s political system, first from the outside, as a partisan party leader and conservative political activist; then, from deep within the system itself, as a senior member of Congress, a member of the congressional leadership and an advisor to Presidents, and then from the outside again, as an award-winning lecturer at Harvard and Princeton, a political columnist and broadcaster, and a mentor to a new generation of public officeholders. It has been a unique vantage point, one matched by no other observer of American politics, and that combination of perspectives has led to a series of breathtaking proposals not to replace one party with another, or replace some officials with others, but to change the entire political system from top to bottom, creating a system that recaptures what America’s founders intended: a government in which the voice of the people is actually heard; a system in which, within the bounds of the Constitution, the people themselves control the levers of government.

    What Edwards proposes is a far-reaching change in how campaigns are funded, eradicating the ability of political insiders to limit voters’ choices by controlling who can be on the ballot, and depriving parties of the right to shape congressional districts for their own advantage, undermining the Founders’ vision of truly representative government.

    Edwards’ proposals have stirred a national political movement through his book, The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, a movement that has been fueled by groundbreaking articles in The Atlantic, Daedalus, The New York Times, and other major publications. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in an editorial: “The man widely credited with helping the open primary proposal gain steam nationally is former Rep. Mickey Edwards ... who advocated for both redistricting and primary reform in his 2012 book ... This should be Missouri’s future ... Neither major political party likes these ideas. Why? It takes the primaries out of their hands and puts the power where it belongs, with the people.”

    Edwards’ arguments have changed the national debate about the extreme control political parties exercise over our political system—arguments heard on television broadcasts as diverse as Charlie Rose, the PBS NewsHour and Bill Moyers, and on outlets ranging from CNN and NPR to MSNBC and Al Jazeera, and before audiences ranging from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to trade associations and from labor unions to college campuses.

Mickey Edwards Videos

  • McCloskey Speaker Series:The Future of Conservatism in the Age of Trump
  • Mickey Edwards on How Conservatives Have Lost Their Way ...
  • It's Time to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans with ...

Mickey Edwards Books

Speaker Lists Featuring Mickey Edwards

FAQs on booking Mickey Edwards

  • How do I book Mickey Edwards to speak at my event?

    Our experienced booking agents have successfully helped clients around the world secure speakers like Mickey Edwards for speaking engagements, personal appearances, product endorsements, or corporate entertainment since 2002. Click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page to check availability 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 speaking fee information and check availability for Mickey Edwards or any other speaker of your choice.
  • What are the speaker fees for Mickey Edwards

    Speaking fees for Mickey Edwards, or any other speakers and celebrities, are determined based on a number of factors and may change without notice. The estimated fees to book Mickey Edwards are $10,000 - $20,000 for live events and $10,000 - $20,000 for virtual events. For the most current speaking fee to hire Mickey Edwards, click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536 to speak directly with an experienced booking agent.
  • What topics does Mickey Edwards speak about?

  • Where does Mickey Edwards travel from?

    Mickey Edwards generally travels from Washington, DC, USA, but can be booked for private corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. For more details, please contact an AAE Booking agent.
  • Who is Mickey Edwards’s agent?

    AAE Speakers Bureau has successfully booked keynote speakers like Mickey Edwards for clients worldwide since 2002. As a full-service speaker 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. Please click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page including the details of your event, 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 speaker booking agency?

    AAE Speakers Bureau is a full-service speaker booking agency, meaning we can completely manage the speaker’s or celebrity’s engagement with your organization from the time of booking your speaker through the event’s completion. We provide all of the services you need to host Mickey Edwards or any other speaker of your choice, including offer negotiation, contractual assistance, accounting and billing, and event speaker travel and logistics services. When you book a speaker with us, we manage the process of hosting a speaker for you as an extension of your team. Our goal is to give our clients peace of mind and a best-in-class service experience when booking a speaker with us.
  • Why is AAE Speakers Bureau different from other booking agencies?

    If you’re looking for the best, unbiased speaker recommendations, paired with a top-notch customer service experience, you’re in the right place. At AAE Speakers Bureau, we exclusively represent the interests of our clients - professional organizations, companies, universities, and associations. We intentionally do not represent the speakers we feature or book. That is so we can present our clients with the broadest and best performing set of speaker options in the market today, and we can make these recommendations without any obligation to promote a specific speaker over another. This is why when our agents suggest a speaker for your event, you can be assured that they are of the highest quality with a history of proven success with our other clients.

Mickey Edwards is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as THE ABSENT CONGRESS , CREATING A RESPONSIBLE FOREIGN POLICY , EDUCATING CITIZENS TO BE CITIZENS , RECLAIMING CONSERVATISM, DOES THE CONSTITUTION STILL MATTER? AMERICANS AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE and FIXING AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICAL SYSTEM. The estimated speaking fee range to book Mickey Edwards for your event is $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 Daniel Altman, Robert Bryce, John Zogby, Ralph Nader and Nicholas Burns. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Mickey Edwards for an upcoming live or virtual event.

Mickey Edwards Speaking Topics

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • FIXING AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICAL SYSTEM

    Mickey Edwards has been a part of—and a student of—America’s political system, first from the outside, as a partisan party leader and conservative political activist; then, from deep within the system itself, as a senior member of Congress, a member of the congressional leadership and an advisor to Presidents, and then from the outside again, as an award-winning lecturer at Harvard and Princeton, a political columnist and broadcaster, and a mentor to a new generation of public officeholders. It has been a unique vantage point, one matched by no other observer of American politics, and that combination of perspectives has led to a series of breathtaking proposals not to replace one party with another, or replace some officials with others, but to change the entire political system from top to bottom, creating a system that recaptures what America’s founders intended: a government in which the voice of the people is actually heard; a system in which, within the bounds of the Constitution, the people themselves control the levers of government.

    What Edwards proposes is a far-reaching change in how campaigns are funded, eradicating the ability of political insiders to limit voters’ choices by controlling who can be on the ballot, and depriving parties of the right to shape congressional districts for their own advantage, undermining the Founders’ vision of truly representative government.

    Edwards’ proposals have stirred a national political movement through his book, The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, a movement that has been fueled by groundbreaking articles in The Atlantic, Daedalus, The New York Times, and other major publications. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote in an editorial: “The man widely credited with helping the open primary proposal gain steam nationally is former Rep. Mickey Edwards ... who advocated for both redistricting and primary reform in his 2012 book ... This should be Missouri’s future ... Neither major political party likes these ideas. Why? It takes the primaries out of their hands and puts the power where it belongs, with the people.”

    Edwards’ arguments have changed the national debate about the extreme control political parties exercise over our political system—arguments heard on television broadcasts as diverse as Charlie Rose, the PBS NewsHour and Bill Moyers, and on outlets ranging from CNN and NPR to MSNBC and Al Jazeera, and before audiences ranging from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to trade associations and from labor unions to college campuses.

Mickey Edwards Speaker Videos

  • McCloskey Speaker Series:The Future of Conservatism in the Age of Trump
    Mickey Edwards on How Conservatives Have Lost Their Way ...
  • It's Time to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans with ...
    Does the Constitution Still Matter? by Mickey Edwards - YouTube
  • Mickey Edwards
    Could the Constitution Evolve?

Mickey Edwards News

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