President Joe Biden is bestowing the second-highest civilian medal on Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, leaders of the congressional investigation into the 2021 Capitol riot who Donald Trump has said should be jailed for their roles in the inquiry.
Biden is awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 people in a ceremony at the White House, including Americans who fought for marriage equality, a pioneer in treating wounded soldiers, and two of the president's longtime friends, former Sens. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
Other former lawmakers being honored include former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum, the first woman to represent Kansas; former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J.; and former Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., who championed gun safety measures after her son and husband were shot to death.
The Presidential Citizens Medal was created by President Richard Nixon in 1969 and is the country’s second-highest civilian honor after the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes people who “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”
“President Biden believes these Americans are bonded by their common decency and commitment to serving others,” the White House said in a statement. “The country is better because of their dedication and sacrifice.”
Biden last year honored people who were involved in defending the Capitol from a mob of angry Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, or who helped safeguard the will of American voters during the 2020 presidential election, when Trump tried and failed to overturn the results.
Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman, and Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, led the House committee that investigated the insurrection. The committee's final report asserted that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the election he lost to Biden and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. Thompson wrote that Trump “lit that fire.”
Cheney, who lost her seat in the GOP primary in August, later said she would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race and campaigned with the Democratic nominee. Biden has been considering whether to offer preemptive pardons to Cheney and others Trump has targeted.
During an interview with NBC's “Meet the Press,” the president-elect said that “Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps."
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” he said.
Cheney and Thompson were “an embarrassment to this country" for their conduct on the committee, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung asserted.
Biden is also giving the award to attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage, and Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage equality movement.
Other honorees include Frank Butler, who set new standards for using tourniquets on war injuries; Diane Carlson Evans, an Army nurse during the Vietnam War who founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation; and Eleanor Smeal, an activist who led women's rights protests in the 1970s and fought for equal pay.
He's also giving the award to photographer Bobby Sager, academics Thomas Vallely and Paula Wallace, and Frances Visco, the president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
Biden will honor four people posthumously: Joseph Galloway, a former war correspondent who wrote about the first major battle in Vietnam in the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young"; civil rights advocate and attorney Louis Lorenzo Redding; former Delaware judge Collins Seitz; and Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was held with other Japanese Americans during World War II and challenged the detention.