Biden to honor Liz Cheney with Presidential Citizens Medal
President Joe Biden will honor former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and 19 others on Thursday with the Presidential Citizens Medal, a tribute given to those who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or fellow Americans.
Biden will bestow the honor on Cheney — one of the GOP’s most outspoken critics of President-elect Donald Trump, who joined Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on the campaign trail last year in a bipartisan push to defeat him — less than three weeks before Trump is inaugurated.
Cheney served as vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, and in October, she urged Americans to reject his “depraved cruelty” as she rallied alongside Harris. A majority of voters were not persuaded by that argument.
Trump and some of his advisers have threatened to punish his political opponents once he takes office on Jan. 20. That has led Biden and his top aides to consider preemptive pardons for figures like Cheney and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who warned that Trump was “fascist to the core.” The Constitution gives a president broad clemency powers, but the practice of granting preemptive pardons for offenses that have not been charged is largely untested.
Alongside Cheney, Biden will award Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), who served as the chairman of the Jan. 6 House select committee, with the Presidential Citizens Medal.
Other honorees include attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage and argued before the Supreme Court in the landmark marriage-equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, and lawyer and activist Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage-equality movement.
Veterans, health care advocates and former lawmakers, some with close, decades-long ties to Biden, are also on the list. Among them are former senators Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), as well as two-time NBA champion and former senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), a Hall of Fame forward who played for the New York Knicks before embarking on a career in politics.