OPINION:
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation presented its 2025 Profile in Courage Award on Sunday night. The foundation says the honor is “presented annually to public servants for making a courageous decision of conscience without regard for the personal or professional consequences.”
Judging by the foundation’s selection this year, no acts of political courage were seemingly worthy of its recognition in the past year and it had to reach back more than four years to find one.
How else do you explain the 2025 Profile in Courage Award presented to former Vice President Mike Pence, supposedly “for putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power on January 6, 2021,” when he presided over a joint session of Congress that ratified the results of the 2020 presidential election?
If Mr. Pence’s actions were so meritorious, such an upstanding and outstanding exemplar of political courage, why did he not receive the award in 2021, or 2022 at the latest?
Curiously, Rep. Liz Cheney was awarded a 2022 Profile in Courage Award. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, chose the Donald Trump-hating Republican, who gave her odious Jan. 6 kangaroo court a false facade of bipartisanship. Ironically, Ms. Cheney received the award about three months before Wyoming Republican primary voters utterly repudiated her in the second-worst drubbing of a congressional incumbent in history.
In 2022, I nominated Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two Democrats who demonstrated steadfast political courage in standing up to their party colleagues that January.
In the face of ad hominem attacks from fellow Democrats, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema refused to join the other 46 Senate Democrats (and the two in-name-only “independents” who invariably voted the party line) in their hyperpartisan bid to abolish the Senate filibuster so they could ram their far-left agenda through Congress over Republican opposition.
That apparently didn’t qualify as a profile in political courage in the selection committee’s view.
I also submitted a nominee for the 2025 award, but again, she didn’t win.
“Lindy Li didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left her,” I wrote in nominating the party fundraiser and strategist. I noted that Ms. Li had quit the Democratic Party in disgust after the November presidential election and “exposed how [Democratic presidential nominee Kamala] Harris’ campaign raised and squandered more than $1 billion in campaign funds.”
I noted that Democrats had reviled Ms. Li as a traitor for having done so.
“I didn’t leave the [Democratic National Committee],” Ms. Li told Fox News in February. “They pushed me out for simply asking for accountability for how the billions of dollars were spent.”
There’s no way of knowing whether Ms. Li was ever seriously considered for the prize, but her political courage was, at minimum, more contemporaneous for the purposes of the 2025 prize than Mr. Pence’s.
Mr. Pence was characteristically low-key in his acceptance speech Sunday night. He thanked his wife and family and the people of Indiana for their support in electing him governor and sending him to Congress over the years.
In what surely must have disappointed most of those in attendance at the gala, Mr. Pence’s livestreamed speech offered none of the partisan anti-Trump red meat that his mostly Democratic audience in Boston was surely hoping and salivating for.
To his credit, the former vice president, in his 17-minute acceptance speech, didn’t mention President Trump by name nor allude to him indirectly, much less blame his former boss for the actions of the protesters who thronged the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, hoping that the 2020 presidential election results could and would somehow be overturned. (With the benefit of hindsight, given the disastrous Biden presidency that ensued, one could be forgiven for wishing they had succeeded.)
Mr. Pence surely knew that had he made any remarks against Mr. Trump, Democrats would have seized on them for talking points and attack ads.
Although the choice of Mr. Pence for this year’s Profile in Courage Award for actions he took well over four years earlier was curious, it was hardly surprising to those of us who have tracked the award for years.
Republicans other than Ms. Cheney who have received the award include Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee feted in 2021 for voting in the Senate to impeach Mr. Trump, and George H.W. Bush, who was honored in 2014 (!) for breaking his 1988 campaign pledge not to raise taxes as president. Breaking that promise contributed mightily to his reelection defeat four years later.
Perhaps you see a pattern here: Republicans win the Profile in Courage Award only when they cross party lines and side with Democrats. The aisle-crossing never seems to work the other way.
Former President John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, her son Jack Schlossberg, who averred that “breaking ranks with your party has always taken courage,” and the others at the foundation who select the recipients of the annual award have another chance to prove me wrong on that score next year.
The nomination period for the 2025 honor closed in February, so an act of political courage deserving of recognition that occurred in April should be considered for the 2026 prize.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act by a vote of 220-208 on April 10. The act aims to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in our elections.
It passed with the support of four Democrats who defied their party’s strident and fallacious opposition to the election integrity measure.
The four Democrats who courageously crossed the aisle were Reps. Ed Case of Hawaii, Jared Golden of Maine, Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.
“In times of partisan divide and political gridlock, uplifting stories of political courage from across the country is how we can inspire leaders to work together for the common good,” the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation insists.
“Working together for the common good” is precisely what those four Democrats did in voting to ensure election integrity in the face of hysterical claims of the 208 other members of their party in Congress that the SAVE Act would supposedly “disenfranchise millions.”
Those claims were as scurrilous as they were baseless, and rejecting them was a profile in political courage seldom seen among Democrats. Will the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation acknowledge and reward it? We’ll be watching.
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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