Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers will be one of five individuals honored with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Bowers, who drew national attention for refusing to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential race, is one of five people the organization is recognizing under this year's theme of "Defending Democracy.'' Others range from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. Sen. Liz Cheney to Wanda Moss, an election worker in Fulton County, Ga. who received death threats after being accused of processing fake ballots for Joe Biden.
Bowers said he's honored to be in such company, saying all he did was honor the will of voters.
But the Republican lawmaker from Mesa also told Capitol Media Services that the honor actually comes with political baggage as he attempts to move to the Senate where he faces a GOP primary battle with former state Sen. David Farnsworth.
That's because the decennial redistricting has stripped away part of what was the district from which he has repeatedly been reelected, replaced by much of what used to be the one represented by Republicans Sen. Kelly Townsend and Rep. John Fillmore. Both have advanced — and continue to advance — election conspiracy theories.
Bowers said, though, he remains convinced that his decisions he made in the wake of the 2020 election, including shutting down a proposed House investigation into the results, was the correct one.
The honors, which have been bestowed since 1990, are named for a 1957 book that Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, wrote about eight senators who he felt had exhibited great courage despite pressure from their political parties and constituents.
Last year was the first that those in a committee chosen by the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, including Kennedy family members, made awards based on a theme, that being to honor those involved in fighting the COVID epidemic. That continued this year with the theme of defending democracy.
Bowers was tapped for his decision to buck pressure from his own party to decertify the election results that showed Democrat Joe Biden outpolling Republican incumbent Donald Trump by 10,457 votes and instead have the Republican-controlled legislature certify its own slate of Republicans to cast the state's 11 electoral votes for Trump.
The pressure even included calls from both Trump as well as some of the president's associates like attorney Boris Epshteyn who claimed a series of irregularities in the voting. And Bowers, who found protesters at his house calling him a pedophile, even rebuffed a call on Jan. 6 by U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs who was trying to convince the speaker to recall the state's 11 electors who were pledged to vote for Biden.
He also refused to allow Rep. Mark Finchem, R-Oro Valley, to convene a hearing of his Federal Relations Committee in the days after the 2020 election to hear "evidence'' of election fraud from Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. So Finchem and fellow election deniers instead convened what they called a public hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel.
More recently, Bowers has used his power as speaker to quash legislation he said does not advance election security but only serves to throw more hurdles in the path of those who want to cast a ballot.
One of those belonged to Fillmore who proposed repealing laws that allow anyone to get an early ballot and bar all other forms of early voting, requiring instead that all ballots be cast only on Election Day. And it would have scrapped the current system of having ballots tabulated by machine, replacing that with a hand count of all votes cast, a figure that exceeded 3.4 million in 2020.
But the provision that alarmed Bowers and some others would have required the legislature to call itself into special session after every election to review the ballot tabulation process. More to the point, it would permit lawmakers to "accept or reject the election returns,'' with the latter option paving the way for anyone to file suit to seek a new election.
Bowers said while he voted for Trump, that was unacceptable. And he said the audit of Maricopa County's 2020 election returns ordered by Senate President Karen Fann has not produced any evidence that, as some have alleged, the election was stolen from Trump.
"When we gave a fundamental right to the people, I don't care if I win or lose, that right was theirs,'' he said at the time. "And I'm not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.''