Chet Edwards

A few days before ending his 20 years in Congress, U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, met with the Tribune-Herald editorial board to discuss his career as well as prospects for progress in the 112th Congress that convenes this week. Edwards, 59, talked about U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn’s hold on a bill to confer national monument status on the Waco Mammoth Site; Edwards’ uneasy alliance with President George W. Bush in backing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008; and his belief in the congressional earmark process, something even some tea party Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann are beginning to acknowledge.

U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, walks the route of the Veterans Day Parade in Waco. Days earlier he was defeated by retired Bryan businessman Bill Flores.
Rod Aydelotte / Tribune-Herald

You’re days from ending 20 years in Congress, plus another eight years in the Texas Senate. How do you feel?

This has been a good ride — 28 years representing Waco — and I feel nothing but gratitude to the people of this district who gave me this privilege. Somebody told me there’s only 500 people who have ever served in Congress 20 years or longer, so I’m nothing but grateful to the people of McLennan County and the district. I hope we made a difference for our community on some things that I think were important. Now’s the time to open a new chapter in my life and I’m young enough to be able to do that. I feel comfortable and relaxed.

Considering the great demands required, we want to tell you what we’ve told servicemen: Thank you for your service.

Thank you. Truly the most humbling and inspiring experience for me has been getting to know our incredible troops, their families and their kids and the sacrifices they all make. I’d feel bad when I left Lea Ann and the boys for two or three days or a week or even the month of October to come back to the district while the kids were in school in Virginia. Then I’d think, “Well, wait a minute — a soldier’s gone for 12 months in combat, comes back home for 12 months, then goes back over there.” I’ve met soldiers who have been over there four or five times.

What are you going to do?

Don’t know. We stayed busy till a week ago with the special session. I’m disappointed about the Waco Mammoth Site. We kept working that and other issues, appropriations. We didn’t know till the very end whether we’d get that omnibus appropriations bill through the Senate. And, frankly, I didn’t want to get into the interview process while we still had appropriations pending. There are too many companies and people that appropriations impact. My game plan in November was to put Congress behind me and work on my future career, but I didn’t know we’d go till almost Christmas Eve. We have always planned on coming back to Waco. The question is whether we do that immediately or let the children finish the school year in Virginia. I don’t know what the job market is exactly for a former member of Congress. Probably make more money and work fewer hours. But I’m ready to catch my breath and spend time with family. I look to open up a new chapter in my life. I’m not going to spend time trying to lay groundwork for another office.

It sounds like Bill Flores is intent on wrapping up some of the projects you were handling that were left hanging.

I’ve shared information about some of the various projects we’ve worked on. Our conversations have been very cordial. And, gosh, the Waco Mammoth Site is something we’ve been working on for years. I put $400,000 into the project in 2005 to do a study and helped Baylor collect some of the materials. I was so excited when we passed that bill (to confer national monument status on it) in the House. Now, Sen. Tom Coburn is a very principled man. I worked quietly with Coburn’s office about his hold on the legislation in the Senate last summer and I said, “Look, I’m not going to attack the senator in the press. He’s taken a principled position. I just wish he would rethink this considering the people of Waco raised more than $3 million for this. We didn’t come to Washington looking for a handout without helping in it ourselves.”

Did Coburn give any response?

Well, his chief of staff said he appreciated that we didn’t attack the senator and said there might be a chance, but then about a month ago they sent a letter saying they objected to expanding the National Park System — by five acres. There comes a point when you have to look at the big picture, I think. But I respect him, there’s nothing personal about all this. But expansion of the National Park System by five acres — I just never could understand the problem in that.

It’s really amazing one senator could block something like that.

You know what I wish the Senate would do in October 2012, before they know which party is going to control the Senate: Get together and agree on a bipartisan basis what the rules of the Senate ought to be. It’s difficult to get much at all done there. Now the good news about U.S. Senate rules is that they force some bipartisanship — more bipartisanship than you get in the House. If you have a strong leader in the House — a Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, strong in the sense of being able to corral 218 votes — they don’t have to deal with the minority. In the Senate you do, so it requires some bipartisanship. Beyond that, personal interaction can cut through this matter over the Waco Mammoth Site. I’d see if a delegation of business leaders could meet with Sens. Coburn and John Cornyn. The problem with the mammoth site is going to be that Sen. Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, doesn’t like the idea of absolutely no federal funds because it means they couldn’t send in even one National Park System person to be sure the monument is dignified enough to be worthy of the designation of a national monument. With more time, there may be a way to work this. But I’d go directly to Coburn. He’s not against Waco. He’s not attacking our community. He’s a principled conservative. Maybe other principled conservatives can go to him.

Any advice for your successor in Congress?

I don’t think he needs advice from me. He’s a smart man. If he ever has a question, he can talk to me. I wouldn’t suggest this as advice to him, but one of the greatest lessons Rep. Olin “Tiger” Teague gave me was the importance of doing your work quietly behind the scenes and developing respect from your peers, Democratic and Republican. It’s one of the most important things you can do. That was my approach. What you see on C-SPAN every night is a different crowd and it’s the far left and the far right, talking every night and going on the cable talk shows. If that’s their role in Congress, OK. But I took a different path.

Have you spoken with Speaker Pelosi and President Obama since the election? Judging from our survey of local voters, the unpopularity of their policies and style of governance contributed greatly to your defeat.

I’ve had brief conversations with both of them and said I hope they listen to the voters and realize that people want change, that Democrats have not been connecting with everyday citizens, and that they should not minimize the message of this election. It wasn’t just failure to communicate on an issue or two, it was a deep-seated sense of frustration over the economy and the deficit and a general sense of government expansion and they need to address that.

Let’s go up 35,000 feet off the deck and look at the broad picture. In light of the stranglehold that the national debt and entitlement programs have on us, is there anything you see coming in the next few years that suggests we can fix this mess?

It won’t happen easily. I’m convinced that neither party has made responsible fiscal decisions. Till someone can prove otherwise, I think you can make a good case for a balanced budget constitutional amendment that gives you the ability in time of war or a recession to have a deficit but requires supermajorities to do so. American people are resilient. American business is resilient. I think it’s a positive thing that, after people just ignoring the deficit issue for so long, they’re now talking about it. But in the short term the Democratic caucus after the election is going to the left and the Republican caucus to the right and you’re losing your centrists on both sides of the aisle. I don’t think our system of checks and balances can work without centrist bridge-builders.

You don’t think Americans will be rioting in the streets when the retirement age is raised or some other sacrifice is required?

That’s why it requires bipartisanship. In 1983 Social Security was within six months of insolvency, and Ronald Reagan, Tip O’Neill and Jake Pickle got together. The bipartisanship was important not only to solve the problem but to sell the people on the tough choices that had to be made. The reason the health care reform bill is in trouble is that it was done on a partisan basis and you can’t solve the big problems on a partisan basis. Energy, immigration reform, the deficit, health care — those issues have to have bipartisanship, not just to pass the law but just as importantly to convince the American people those choices must be made. But look — to have Sens. Tom Coburn and Dick Durbin vote for the bipartisan deficit commission’s recommendation, that was a huge step forward.

How do earmarks fare in all this? Some Republicans are already reconsidering the idea of banning earmarks in the long term.

Well, transparency is vitally important. Two years ago we made some steps forward in terms of such transparency where the day you asked for an earmark in Congress, you had to post it on your website. If they can find a way to make it not only more transparent but easily accessible to the public — well, the press can be an important part of the checks and balances to weed out the bad ones. But where you’ll have a real disagreement is with, say, a lobster research project. That might sound ridiculous in landlocked Waco but in Maine, where that’s a key part of their local economy, it’s not so ridiculous. Article I (in the Constitution) gives Congress, not the executive branch, the power of appropriations. If Congress won’t abuse it and there’s enough transparency to weed out the embarrassing projects, giving local people a chance to have an impact on where their tax dollars are spent is important. The problem is if we have no earmarks and that becomes permanent, let me tell you who loses out — cities like Waco and your rural communities, because we don’t have the political power within the executive branch or the economic ability to hire a hundred grant-writers and experts, which Los Angeles can do and Houston can do and New York can do. If done properly, transparently and responsibly, I think congressional earmarks can really be the venture capital of government where you take a little bit of seed money and plant it here and there. During the days of Tiger Teague and Bob Poage in Congress, you know what the supposedly wasteful projects of the day were? Lakes. They were attacked mercilessly for these pork-barrel, wasteful lake projects. Well, where would Central Texas be today without Lake Waco, Lake Belton and Lake Whitney? Think of what Lake Travis has done for economic development.

What was your toughest vote in your 20 years on Capitol Hill?

Well, I’ll never regret my vote for TARP. From a political standpoint, it was one of the worst political votes I ever took in my life. I don’t know if it was my finest hour, but I think it was a case of Congress and the Bush administration acting responsibly, making a tough choice that was the right thing for our country. I think economists are starting to bear witness that it was the right thing to do. You go back and look at the economic indicators — the capital markets had shut down, businesses weren’t going to be able to get operating loans. Fear had set in. We had to take action and I credit President Bush for making that choice and Congress for making the decision. And if some of us paid some price — well, I don’t blame my election defeat on that one vote but it was one of the votes that created a problem for a lot of us on both sides of the aisle.

Do you feel there’s anything you could have done differently to change the outcome of the District 17 election?

(Laughter.) No, it was a tidal wave. There was nothing I could have done. I’m really not interested in looking back. I’m more interested in looking ahead. But there were other things in my case: My endorsement of President Obama. And then Nancy Pelosi out of the blue — I sure didn’t ask her — suggested publicly that I be considered for vice president and so I wound up being one of the five vetted. I think in a lot of voters’ minds that significantly changed the perception of my being this independent-minded Texas Democrat. And the truth is I was a Democrat who hadn’t been to a Democratic National Convention since 1990.

Is there any place in Washington that you’ll miss?

Well, you know, I’ll tell you — it always inspired me to look out my office window. I say always, though it took me 16 years to get that window. But when I looked out at the American flag flying over the Capitol dome, that always moved me. My day would begin with my driving by Arlington Cemetery. I purposely exited there every day because I wanted to remind myself of the sacrifices that others had made for my family. And then I’d go to the Capitol and see that flag. And despite all the imperfections of our system, it’s still such an incredible democracy. It’s amazing the Founding Fathers could design a system more than 200 years ago that still works today, imperfect though it may be. We have freedoms and opportunities that most people in the world can’t even dream about. I’ll miss that view.

Interview condensed and edited by senior editor Bill Whitaker.