Bipartisanship and the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Senator Elizabeth Dole with President Joe Biden

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden gave a number of Americans the highest award to be bestowed upon an American citizen, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Dating back to 1963 under President Kennedy (and under another name prior all the way to 1945 with President Truman), figures across all mediums have won the award.  This month, some of the recipients were Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky, scientist Jane Rigby, and actress Michelle Yeoh.  We also saw a number of politicians who won this award, including former Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State John Kerry, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi...and Senator Elizabeth Dole.  Dole's choice is hardly surprising.  In addition to being a US Senator, Dole has served as a cabinet secretary under two presidencies (running Transportation under President Reagan and running Labor under President Bush), as well as heading the American Red Cross and being one of the first major female candidates to run for the White House.  The surprising thing to lay viewers of the award, though, is that Dole is a Republican while President Biden is, of course, a Democrat.

This isn't actually surprising in the long history of the Presidential Medal of Freedom award.  President Reagan, for example, gave awards to Gov. Ella Grasso & Senator Mike Mansfield, both Democrats, while President Clinton gave awards to not only his Republican predecessor Gerald Ford, but also the man who ran against him in 1996, Senator Bob Dole (Elizabeth Dole's husband).  Even during more contentious presidencies, George W. Bush honored Tom Lantos & Sonny Montgomery, Barack Obama honored George HW Bush & Richard Lugar, and during his presidency, in addition to Elizabeth Dole, Joe Biden has given the award to Alan Simpson & John McCain.

In fact, the only president in the last 40 years to not honor a person who was elected to public office from his opposing party was (you guessed it) President Donald Trump.  Trump gave the award to five people who had held political office as a partisan Republican: Orrin Hatch, Jim Ryun, Devin Nunes, & Jim Jordan, as well as Attorney General Edwin Meese, who served during the Reagan administration.  Technically Trump did, to his credit, give an award to a Democrat (Minnesota Supreme Court Justice and football great Alan Page), though Page never held office as a Democrat, though he has not been shy about his politics (and has been publicly critical of Trump), but that's it.  Trump never gave the honor to someone who had served in the other party in Congress, yet another political norm shattered by the former president.

Biden's selection of Dole, though, begs the question-how much longer will this bipartisan tradition last?  It's impossible to see Trump, currently the polling frontrunner for November, wanting to honor someone of the other party, and quite frankly, it's not clear, even in retirement, if someone of the other party would want the honor from him.  Looking at a few names that might make sense as a Democrat to get the award from any administration (Biden's or Trump's), former/current members of Congress like Steny Hoyer, Marcy Kaptur, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or (posthumously) Dianne Feinstein...none of these figures would make it past Trump's screening process, and it's near certain that they wouldn't take the award to begin with from Trump.

But in Trump's America, where partisanship matters more than country, we're also in a situation where the reverse will soon be true.  It's worth noting that the three Republicans that Biden picked (Dole, Simpson, & McCain) are all uniquely out-of-politics.  Dole & Simpson both served with Biden, in Simpson's case for decades, and had a personal relationship with him from a time before the Trump Era; the same can be said for McCain's (who received the award posthumously) family, as his widow even serves in the Biden administration.  Biden has actively ignored giving this award to figures who have been a part of the Trump Era, or quite frankly even figures that were antagonistic during the Obama-Biden administration (John Boehner, for example, has yet to win this prize despite being a potential recipient).  Looking at Biden & Dole, I was struck by how this is a rare moment of political civility in a town that used to run it.  As the Republican Party has become the Trump Party, I would imagine this tradition will go the way of the dodo too, as neither side will want to risk condoning the behavior of their political opponent, because Republicans don't treat the other side as opponents, but as enemies.