House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will receive the 2019 Profile in Courage award, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation announced Sunday.
The award, created in honor of JFK, is being given to Pelosi for her role in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and for helping the Democratic Party regain a majority in the House in the 2018 midterm elections.
The foundation said it was bestowing the award to Pelosi for “putting the national interest above her party’s interest to expand access to health care for all Americans and then, against a wave of political attacks, leading the effort to retake the majority and elect the most diverse Congress in our nation’s history.”
The Affordable Care Act had appeared dead in Congress in 2010 following the election of then-Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., which cost the Democrats supermajority control of the Senate. Pelosi, who had earlier pushed for broader reform than the ACA, lobbied lawmakers to get former President Barack Obama’s plan passed. “If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed,” she told reporters at the time.
Pelosi called Sunday’s announcement a “great personal and official honor” and added: “At President Kennedy’s inauguration, I was blessed to hear him speak of ‘the energy, the faith, the devotion…that will light our country and all who serve it – and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.’ It is inspiring that the award itself is a lantern, a manifestation of that light.”
Previous recipients of the award in recent years include former Presidents Barack Obama, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
The award will be presented to Pelosi by JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, and her son, Jack Schlossberg, at a ceremony on May 19 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Massachusetts.
