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Joe Biden got Strom Thurmond to do what now?

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

On Monday, it was the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legendary ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. Naturally, the current occupant of the White House took the opportunity to further divide the country on race. It was not his best moment, among very few good moments thus far into a disastrous presidency.

In the historic yellow-curtained East Room, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. offered several passages which will be snuffed out by historians because it’s otherwise too embarrassing and stupid to record for posterity.

From the addled, silly, and lighthearted side of the address, Biden recognized those cabinet-level guests in attendance, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Or actually, Biden didn’t recognize him. He certainly couldn’t remember his name.



Again, embarrassing, but not the end of the world. Senior moment to be sure, but that’s the problem with this president. Senior moments have expanded virally into senior months, or even senior seasons. This isn’t a new occurrence with him. Remember, he thinks his Health and Human Services secretary is named Javier Baccaria.



Getting back to MLK deep thoughts by Joe Biden from Monday, the aging president had his teleprompter moment, and then tried, and failed, to cover it up.



It’s not exactly the way Al Pacino delivered the line in Godfather III, is it?



Biden took a brief detour into his insidious side by seizing and/or pouncing on the Jacksonville shooting recently, and make this claim.



There were 70,000-plus fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2021 alone. That number has accelerated each year as the border remains wide open and this administration steadfastly refuses to do anything substantial to interdict it, nor hold the Mexican drug cartels or the Chinese Communist Party, the supplier of the raw chemicals to the cartels, accountable. White supremacists are evil, sick, twisted people, and I’d love to throw the book at each and every one of them. There is no place for them in the United States. But by Biden making this claim, he’s willfully ignoring the reality of actual threats of significance the country faces, opting instead to trade in what he believes to be a political wedge issue in order to divide the country further.

Now we get to my favorite cut. On my list of Joe Biden whoppers, the current chart-topper is the Amtrak story, where Biden supposedly gets told after he’d flown a million miles on Air Force 2 in 2015, his favorite train conductor, Angelo, at Angelo’s retirement party at the White House, said he’d already ridden a million miles on Amtrak since he had to go visit his ailing mother. Biden’s mother died in 2010, Angelo retired in 1993 and died in 2013. The entire story is nonsense, unless Joe Biden has a DeLorean equipped with Mr. Fusion in the garage next to the Corvette and the boxes of documents he spirited out of the White House illegally.

There are a lot of stories that make the top 25 in the list of Biden fables. Examples include supposedly talking to the inventor of insulin, driving an 18-wheeler called Big Mama, surviving a small kitchen fire that almost burned his house to the ground, his son, Beau, dying in combat in Iraq, being raised in the Puerto Rico section of Delaware, oil raining from the skies when he went to school in the morning causing him to contract cancer, being a professor at Penn while never actually teaching a single class, getting a job offer from a lumber company in Idaho that had never heard of him, awarding his Uncle Frank a purple heart at the White House, which didn’t happen, being appointed to the Naval Academy, which also didn’t happen. I mean, I could go on and on. If I were to be charitable, Biden takes creative license when embellishing his stories. If I’m honest, Biden is perhaps the biggest serial liar we’ve ever had in the White House, and that’s saying something with Bill Clinton and Donald Trump serving as president just this century alone.

Most of Biden’s fiction, however, has been practiced and honed over the course of years. Brain fog has scrambled dates and details as his stories evolve, but we’ve heard most of these stories at least a dozen times. Monday, at least for me, was a new presentation.



Say what? Biden’s claim is that he literally, not figuratively, convinced Strom Thurmond to vote for the Civil Rights Act right before he died. Let’s see how that stacks up with reality.

The Civil Right Act passed the first time in 1957, signed into law by Dwight D. Eisenhower. It wasn’t without drama, as there was a filibuster in the Senate that just about took it down. Anyone want to hazard a guess on who filibustered it for 24 hours and 18 minutes on the Senate floor? That would be South Carolina Democrat (at the time) Strom Thurmond. The vote eventually did take place, and Thurmond voiced a no vote. By the way, Joe Biden’s role in all this? He was a 21-year old at the time. He was still recovering from his oil rain-induced cancer or something. Maybe he was hanging out with Cornpop at the community pool in the Puerto Rican-Black-Hispanic-Indian part of Delaware. But I do know for certain where Joe Biden wasn’t, and that’s the United States Senate.

The most famous iteration of the Civil Rights Act was of course in 1964, when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed it into law. Strom Thurmond also voted against that bill when it ultimately passed in the Senate. Joe Biden wouldn’t even run for Senate until eight years later in 1972. He was Constitutionally ineligible to even serve as Senator until 1973 when he turned 30.

George H.W. Bush vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which came up in the Senate for an override vote. Strom Thurmond voted no to override the veto, so Joe Biden’s influence apparently was not felt this time, either.

Fox News asked the White House for clarification after the President’s remarks on Monday, probably out of morbid curiosity, but also just because it would be entertaining to see how the comms shop at 1600 would spin this in an attempt to explain what in the actual hell Biden might have been talking about.

The White House told Houston Keene of Fox Digital,

A White House spokesperson told Fox News Digital that Biden was instrumental in getting Thurmond’s vote for the Voting Rights Act, in 1980.

Terrific. Now we’ve cleared that up. Except we haven’t. There was no Voting Rights Act in 1980. There was a Voting Rights Act in 1982, however, which extended the voting rights provision of the 1964 act by another 25 years. Now perhaps Joe Biden was influential in Strom Thurmond’s thinking in his yes vote in 1982. But what probably had more of an impact was the other 84 colleagues of Thurmond that also voted yes, making the final tally 85-8. Even if Joe Biden did twist the old man’s arm to vote yes, it was literally meaningless. There was no controversy whatsoever surrounding the vote. It was never in doubt that it would pass. It cleared the filibuster hurdle by a slim 25 votes. If he had any influence at all on Thurmond’s thinking, his vote was not pivotal in the bill’s outcome.

Moreover, going back to Biden’s original claim, that he got him to change his vote on the Civil Rights Act right before he died, this offering by the White House as an explanation was 21 years before Thurmond died, in 2003. In other words, Joe Biden got every single word of his statement wrong, including the words AND and THE.

I’ll have to go back and revise my list of greatest Biden fables. I’m not sure where this one will rank, but it’s got to be top five with a bullet.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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