Mr. Biden also called out redistricting in Alabama, where activists have said votes of the state’s Black residents have been diluted.
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“As I come here in commemoration, not for show, Selma is a reckoning,” Mr. Biden said. “The right to vote, the right to vote, to have your vote counted, is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything’s possible. Without it, without that right, nothing is possible.”
While in office, Mr. Biden has pushed for two pieces of voting rights legislation, including one bill named for Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Georgia Democrat who was among the demonstrators beaten while trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday.
The bill named for Mr. Lewis, who died in 2020, would have restored a key piece of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The provision relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. Those protections were stripped away by the Supreme Court in 2013.
But the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, failed in a Democratic-controlled Congress, and it has little chance of passing now that the House has flipped to Republican control. The For the People Act, an overhaul of federal election laws, also failed.
The president delivered a fiery speech in 2021 warning that Republican-led efforts to restrict voting across the country constituted the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” But in recent months, the tone of Mr. Biden’s impassioned speeches has changed. Now, when the president speaks on the issue, his remarks have given way to something close to public acknowledgment that the fight for voting rights might go longer than he initially promised.
“Look, I get accused of being an inveterate optimist,” Mr. Biden said in a speech in January at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often preached. “Progress is never easy, but redeeming the soul of the country is absolutely essential.”
