Former Vice President Joe Biden said a pro-Confederacy group was made up of “many fine people” in 1993, but he launched his presidential bid by attacking President Donald Trump for similar phrasing.
Biden began his 2020 presidential bid in April by attacking Trump’s response to the deadly 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist rally. Trump said that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and Biden noted that this showed there was a “battle … for the soul of this nation.”
In 1993, Biden, then a senator for Delaware, said during a Senate hearing that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was made up of “many fine people.”
The UDC is a group of southern women who have erected numerous Confederate monuments since the group’s inception, according to The Daily Beast. The UDC put up a monument commemorating the Ku Klux Klan in 1926 in North Carolina, according to the outlet.
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Former Sen. Howell Heflin gave a speech about how his family’s background was “deeply rooted in the Confederacy.” Biden praised this speech, “acknowledging that it was time to change and yield to a position that Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun raised on the Senate floor, not granting a federal charter to an organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag as a symbol.”
Biden appeared to agree that the proposal should not move forward. (RELATED: Biden Buckles, Flips On Hyde Amendment Under Pressure From Democrats)
Biden’s comments came after former Illinois Democratic Sen. Moseley-Braun, the only black member at the time, gave a speech about the Confederate flag. Her commentary caused the Senate to reverse its previous vote and kill a proposal about renewing a patent for the insignia of the UDC.
The patent featured the Confederate flag in a wreath, The Washington Post reported in 1993. Moseley-Braun argued the flag symbolized something different for those descended from slavery.
The symbol of the Confederate flag “is something that has no place in our modern times … no place in this body … no place in our society,” she said, according to WaPo.
Biden’s campaign did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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