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Joe Biden was set to mark what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, aiming to celebrate the civil rights leader’s legacy while reviving his own call for voting rights legislation.
Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments of his first two years in office. The task is even steeper now that Republicans control the US House.
In advance of Biden’s visit to the church where King once preached, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.
“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.
Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.
Biden returns to Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster – a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation – to pass sweeping voting reforms.
“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.
That effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster.
