OAN’s Roy Francis
7:44 AM – Tuesday, August 29, 2023
President Joe Biden claimed to have “literally” convinced South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had left the Democrat party and joined the Republicans, to vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act.
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The president made the claim on Monday while speaking on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the civil rights group, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“Pause for just a moment,” he said. “I thought things had changed. I was able to literally, not figuratively, talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act before he died, and I thought, ‘Well maybe there’s real progress,’ But hate never dies. It just hides, it hides under the rocks.”
Thurmond had left the Democrat party to join the Republicans in September 1964 saying that the Democrats had “abandoned the people” and that the party had moved away from following the United States Constitution.
Previously, Thurmond had filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes, making it the longest filibuster for any Senator in chamber history.
The Civil Rights Act later passed the Senate in June of 1964, despite Thurmond voting against it, and eight years before Biden, who was 21 at the time, had won his first senate seat.
In an attempt to explain the latest blunder by the president, a White House spokesperson later told Fox News that Biden had been “instrumental in getting Thurmond’s vote for the Voting Rights Act, in 1980.”
Similar claims from Biden are now a common occurrence. The most repeated claim by the president is that his son Beau had died in Iraq, even though he had died of brain cancer in the U.S. after his service in Iraq.
“I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq,” Biden had said in 2022 while giving a speech in Colorado to designate Camp Hale as a national monument.
He repeated the same claim about his son while visit with troops at Marine Corps Air State Iwakuni in Japan, while visiting with the survivors of the bombing that took place during the Afghanistan withdrawal and while visiting the Gold Star families as well.
“My son was a major in the U.S. Army. We lost him in Iraq,” the president is known to say.
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