Since Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) blew up Kevin McCarthy‘s House speakership last autumn, congressional Republicans have indeed been in disarray, unable or unwilling to unify their razor-thin control of the House to pass anything capable of winning a vote in the Senate. Appropriate adjectives to describe them would include “messy” or “incompetent.”
What they are indeed not is literally “worse” than the child rapists, Ku Klux Klan sympathizers, and unapologetic racists that President Joe Biden still brags about befriending when he joined — checks notes — a full 51 years ago.
“I’ve been a senator since ’72,” said the president during a San Francisco fundraiser. “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.”
“I told the truth,” Biden said of his sermon. “By the time Strom left, he did terrible things. But by the time he left, he had more African Americans 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.”
Thurmond may have indeed had black friends, or in this case, black subordinates. But how exactly did he treat the nonwhite help? In one case, by raping her.
In January 1925, Carrie Butler, a black girl likely just 15 years old, was working as a maid in the Thurmond family manor in Edgefield, South Carolina. Thurmond, then a 22-year-old college graduate on the cusp of beginning his political career, impregnated Butler. This is not just considered statutory rape under the modern definition; a 1922 state statute criminalized sex with any child younger than 16, as all the available evidence indicates Butler likely was at the time of conception.
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Thurmond had reportedly assaulted women throughout his career, including to the very end. Victims supposedly included sitting United States senators and Emmy-winning journalists. One can assume that if Thurmond was fine physically accosting his literal colleagues, a black child serving as a maid in the segregated South was not just raped by the definition of statutory law but also by any metric of abuse of power, violence, and common decency.
This man, a likely rapist and actual segregationist, is who our current president says is worse than chaotic House Republicans who can’t decide on how much aid we want to give to Ukraine. So much for moral clarity.