WATCH: Biden Weighs in on Debate Over Removing NYC Jefferson Statue

 

President Joe Biden weighed in Thursday on the debate over a Thomas Jefferson statue in New York.

The New York City Council voted to remove the statue from city hall. According to NPR, one council member argued Jefferson shouldn’t be in “a position of honor and recognition and tribute” because he was a slaveholder who “felt that Blacks were inferior to whites — in his own words.”

Anderson Cooper asked the president if he agrees with that decision.

“I think that’s up to the locality to decide what they want to do on that,” Biden responded.

“There’s a lot of people that have no socially redeeming value, historically, and there’s others who have made serious mistake in terms of what exists now in terms of what we should be talking about, but have done an awful lot,” he continued.

Biden talked about America being based on an idea that all men and women are created equal and added, “No nation’s ever been founded on an idea. Have we ever lived up to it? No. But it’s a pretty big idea that somebody wrote that down and got the rest of the country to agree to it. So it depends.”

You can watch above, via CNN.

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Josh Feldman is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: josh@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @feldmaniac