Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers will be honored with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his refusal to consider overturning the 2020 election results despite massive pressure from former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
“I am very grateful for this honor yet cannot help but feel undeserving of it,” said Bowers, a Mesa Republican. “Honoring my oath and the people’s choices at the ballot box are not heroic acts — they are the least that Arizonans should expect from the people elected to serve them.”
The five Profile in Courage Awards announced Thursday, under this year’s theme of “Defending Democracy,” put Bowers in the prestigious company of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Ukraine president was chosen because of the way he has “marshaled the spirit, patriotism and untiring sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in a life-or-death fight for their country,” as Russia pours in troops and assaults cities and towns, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation said.
The foundation said Bowers and three other U.S. officials were chosen for standing up for free and fair elections as the system is challenged in ways it has never been before. The others are Republican Wyoming U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney; Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson; and Fulton County, Georgia, elections employee Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who received death threats after being accused of processing fake ballots for Joe Biden.
Bowers drew national attention for rebuffing repeated, direct efforts by Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani and others to overturn the 2020 election results that saw Biden narrowly defeat Trump in Arizona. Trump and Giuliani urged Bowers in a phone call to retroactively change Arizona law to allow the Legislature to chose a different slate of presidential electors than those picked by the voters.
The honor actually comes with political baggage for Bowers, he told Capitol Media Services on Thursday. As he attempts to move to the state Senate, he faces a GOP primary battle this year with former state Sen. David Farnsworth, who has said he thinks the 2020 election was stolen.
But Bowers said he remains convinced he made the right decisions in the wake of the election, including shutting down a proposed Arizona House investigation into the results.
Bowers bucked pressure from his own party to decertify the election results that showed Biden outpolling Trump by 10,457 votes in Arizona, 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 included calls from Trump as well as some of his associates, including attorney Boris Epshteyn, who claimed a series of irregularities in the voting.
He also rebuffed a call on Jan. 6 from Arizona Republican 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.
Bowers also refused to allow state 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 Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. Finchem and fellow election deniers instead convened what they called a public hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel.
For his efforts, Bowers found protesters at his house calling him a pedophile.
More recently, he 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 paths of those who want to cast a ballot.
One would have repealed laws that allow anyone to get an early ballot and would bar all other forms of early voting, requiring instead that all ballots be cast only on Election Day. It also 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.
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 tabulating process. It would have permitted 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, the proposed legislation was unacceptable. And he said the audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election returns ordered by Senate President Karen Fann did not produce 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.”
On Thursday, Bowers said there is a consistent basis for his choices.
“Some took the easy road of fault-finding and reactionary visions of changing elections in order to establish a winner that clearly was incorrect,” he told Capitol Media Services.
But Bowers said he was not going to “throw away respect for our own constitutional obligations as well as the distortion of the national Constitution to legitimize us throwing out the electors or abolishing the vote of 3-point-what million Arizonans because somebody thinks there was fraud.”
He dismissed much of what has been brought forward as “evidence.” He said much of it falls in the category of “a relative of a relative who saw this or wasn’t allowed to see that.”
“There’s never been proof,” Bowers said. “It’s always ‘statistically, it’s impossible.’”
Bowers said he draws a fine line on what he will allow to come to the House floor and what he will kill.
“If it does not impose an interruptive burden on somebody’s ability to vote, and their ability to vote in a timely way and in a secure way, and the vote would be as fast and as accurate, then the bill goes ‘OK,’” he said.
Bowers said hostility toward him from elements of his own party started even before the election, when he agreed to shut down the legislative session during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 and would not entertain calls to override the COVID-19 emergency declaration issued by GOP Gov. Doug Ducey.
“From that time on, it was open warfare on me and has not stopped,” he said.
Bowers expressed some amazement that he is sharing the honors with Zelenskyy, saying the issues he faces and even the protesters outside his house are nowhere in the same category.
“I’m grateful that I’m not in Kyiv, I’m not in Mariupol,” Bowers said. “I’m not having to hold a country together like President Zelenskyy. I’ve just got my little thing right here.”
The annual award created by Kennedy’s family in 1989 is designed “to recognize and celebrate the quality of political courage that he admired most.” The awards will be presented at a May 22 ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
