He was too busy liberating movie theaters or something.

(CNN) – At the commemoration of the historic Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday expressed guilt for not joining the Alabama demonstration nearly half a century ago.

The vice president also used the opportunity to lament the dozens of voting restrictions proposed by states in the last couple of years and argued against a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that’s now being heard in the Supreme Court.

In his speech, Biden said he watched the first bloody march as a senior in college. The scene, he said, gave him heavy convictions.

“I regret – and although it’s not a part of what I’m supposed to say – I apologize it took me 48 years to get here,” Biden said, shortly before joining a crowd to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. “I should have been here. It’s one of the regrets that I have and many in my generation have.”