Speaker Mike Johnson tore into President Biden for claiming today’s congressional Republicans are worse than the racist segregationists he served with in the Senate.
At a fundraiser Wednesday night in California, Biden told the crowd: ‘I’ve been a senator since ’72. I’ve served with real racists. I’ve served with Strom Thurmond. I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These guys are worse. These guys do not believe in basic democratic principles.’
‘Outrageous,’ Johnson said of the remarks on X.
‘The least popular President to seek re-election is now so desperate and so underwater in the polls he’s playing the race card from the bottom of the deck.’
Biden during his 2020 campaign was forced to apologize for reminiscing fondly about working with southern segregationists.
He gave a glowing eulogy of South Carolina’s Thurmond, who died in office at 100 in 2003 and fiercely opposed racial integration for much of his career.
At a fundraiser Wednesday night in California , Biden told the crowd: ‘I’ve been a senator since ’72. I’ve served with real racists. I’ve served with Strom Thurmond. I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These guys are worse’
Biden, however, did not apologize for that eulogy on Wednesday.
‘I told the truth. By the time Strom left he did terrible things,’ the president said, according to a pool report. ‘But by the time he left he had more African American in his staff than any other member in Congress. He voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.’
‘I’m not making him more than he was. But my point is at least you could work with some of these guys,’ Biden went on. ‘Time and again Republicans show they are the party of chaos and division.’
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden recollected ‘civility’ in the Senate by invoking two segregationists, James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats.
Of Eastland, he said: ‘He never called me “boy, he always called me “son.”‘
He described Talmadge as ‘one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys.’
‘Well guess what?’ Biden went on. ‘At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.’
Weeks later, Biden walked those comments back.
‘Now, was I wrong a few weeks ago to somehow give the impression to people that I was praising those men who I successfully opposed time and again? Yes, I was. I regret it. I’m sorry for any of the pain and misconception I may have caused anybody.’
Biden’s latest remarks come as Congress remains at an impasse over everything from must-pass spending legislation to aid for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific and immigration reform.
The Senate passed a foreign aid package last week that Johnson has suggested is dead on arrival in the House. Johnson now insists he must sit down with Biden to discuss attaching border security provisions to the aid bill – as Biden demands he bring the Senate bill up for a vote.
Congress is also fast approaching another deadline to pass spending legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2024, after having passed three stopgap bills to kick the deadline down the road. Funding for 12 agencies of government will expire on a split timeline of March 1 and March 8.