Opinion: Why Joe Biden looked to segregrationist history to pull the GOP back from the brink on voting rights

Even Wallace, who ran for governor successfully, for a fourth term in 1982, admitted that his pro-segregation past had been a "mistake," and was elected with support from Black voters in Alabama who gave him a second chance.

Response to Biden's remarks, particularly his use of history, was swift: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it "incoherent" and "beneath his (Biden's) office," while Democratic Sen.

Like Thurmond, some of the most strident past opponents of voting rights for Black Americans, southern Democrats -- nicknamed "Dixiecrats" for their advocacy of racial segregation and the denial of Black citizenship -- came, over time, to support congressional extension of the voting rights protections.

Thurmond was once of the most vociferous proponents of racial segregation in postwar America.

Thurmond staged an over 24-hour long filibuster against a Civil Rights Bill that, despite being passed, contained virtually no provisions that would end racial segregation or enforce voting rights.

Yet over the ensuing decades, Thurmond, according to Biden, came to support voting rights during his later years in the Senate.

Indeed, as late as 2006, when Congress passed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act, the Senate voted 98-0 in support.

Two Democratic senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, have expressed support for voting rights but an unwillingness to tinker with the filibuster rules (which, as Barack Obama reminds us, remain a relic of the Jim Crow era) to allow a vote to take place.

In essence the Republican Party in 2022 resembles, in troubling ways, Dixiecrats of yesteryear, a party so extreme that it stands in contrast to the eventual political moderation on voting rights displayed by Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.