Let’s cut to the chase and be as cynical as our country’s political landscape has become.

Waco needs Chet Edwards right now.

He may become expendable two years from now, but the momentum that this community has demonstrated economically at a time of a national economic freefall needs to be stoked by someone with real political power.

Chet Edwards fills that bill.

But what of his liberal, Nancy Pelosi-backing ways, you may ask? Cynically speaking: That’s pure bunk.

Earlier this month, a non-partisan group called Thomas Voting Records, to which we subscribe, analyzed the top votes of Congress this year.

The House conducted 565 roll-call votes, the service said. Of that, they evaluated what they called the top 25 most important votes.

Check the votes

These are issues such as health care reform, military spending and financial regulation.

If you compare how Edwards voted on these 25 measures with the votes of uberconservative Republican Pete Sessions, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, you’ll find they voted the same way a majority of the time.

In fact, Edwards and Sessions cast the same vote 58 percent of the time on these top 25 votes.

So take away party labels and Edwards shows a pretty conservative streak — in line with a majority of Central Texans’ thinking.

But in taking away party labels, there is something more fundamentally disconcerting with the efforts by many in Waco to vote Edwards out of office. And let’s be frank: Most votes for Republican challenger Bill Flores will be anti-Chet and not pro-Bill votes.

At the beginning of this year, McLennan County’s legislative delegation at the state and federal levels was made up of Chet Edwards and John Carter at the federal level; then Kip Averitt, Jim Dunnam and Charles “Doc” Anderson at the state level. In other words, all but one of five legislative representatives had a Waco address. They know Waco intimately as well as they know Waco constituents.

If you introduce party labels and voted pure Republican, our delegation would be left with only one Waco resident: Doc Anderson.

In other words, to spite President Barack Obama and Pelosi and all those other Democrats, Waco residents would have to vote against their own interest and shift the region’s political power to places like Bryan/College Station or to the suburbs of Fort Worth — well away from Waco.

That’s just dumb politics.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. That was the message being conveyed by former state Sen. David Sibley when he recently lost Waco’s seat to Brian Birdwell, who lives in Granbury, shifting the area’s influence in the upper chamber of the Texas Legislature to the northern end of our district.

Comes with a cost

When the Texas Legislature convenes in January, one of their top priorities will be redistricting. You can be certain that the mistakes they made seven years ago when they unsuccessfully tried to stack the congressional district against Chet Edwards will not be repeated.

But at what cost?

Seven years ago, a battle raged among lawmakers about whether to split McLennan County into separate districts — a battle that McLennan County ultimately won in no small measure because state Sen. Kip Averitt stopped it.

Who will stop it next year?

Chet Edwards is a powerful presence in Washington, in part because of his tenure. He can deliver for Waco — now, at a critical time for the growth of this community.

I have to laugh when I hear Bill Flores talk about such things as “repealing ObamaCare.”

Flores is a smart man. If he wins, he will sit quietly among his 434 colleagues and do what his party leadership tells him to do while plotting re-election.

Then he can wait 20 years like Edwards and begin to deliver on some campaign promises he made to Waco or simply shore up his base in his hometown of Bryan.

Carlos Sanchez is editor of the Tribune-Herald .