Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, ripped into President Joe Biden over the weekend following his remarks in recent days about opponents of a Democrat voting reform bill.
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Biden warned of “a true attack on our democracy, from the Jan. 6 insurrection to the onslaught of Republican anti-voting laws in a number of states,” referring to state laws requiring voter ID or barring mass mailing of absentee ballots.
“It’s no longer just about who gets to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote. And whether your vote counts at all. It’s about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion,” Biden said.
Biden also evoked the memory of MLK in his push for the Democrat legislation which would remove most state voter integrity measures.
“It’s not just enough to praise him, we must commit to his unfinished work to deliver jobs and justice, to protect the sacred right to vote, the right from which all other rights flow,” Biden said of the late civil rights icon.
But Alveda King accused Biden of stoking racial division with his anti-voter ID rhetoric.
Voter ID is necessary “because we tell somebody they don’t need an ID, they don’t count,” she told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “They may as well just mark an ‘X’ on a ballot. So we need the ID and sensible voting.”
What “Biden is doing [is] stirring the race card, race-baiting, playing the race card, trying to stir up emotion,” she added.
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During a January 11 on voting rights in Georgia, Biden also referenced Martin Luther King, asking attendees whether they are on his side or the side of white racists.
“Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” he asked.
When he was campaigning for the presidency in June 2020, Biden suggested that MLK’s death did not make as much of an impact as the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis a few weeks earlier.
“Even Dr. King’s assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd’s death did,” Biden said.