Pelosi says Biden’s reference to Bull Connor likely went over most Americans’ heads

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she thought President Biden’s speech In Georgia about the GOP threat to voting rights was “wonderful” but that most Americans were ignorant about the significance of Bull Connor.

“Nobody knows who Bull Connor is, if we’re making the case to say if you’re gonna be with Martin Luther King or Bull Connor. Who’s that?” she said.

Mrs. Pelosi suggested that Mr. Biden should have said the choice over the Democrats voting bill is a choice between siding with “Martin Luther King and John Lewis or the people who unleashed the fierce dogs on them.”

“Strom Thurmond? None of us have a lot of happy memories about Strom Thurmond,” she added about the late South Carolina Republican senator who previously served as a pro-segregationist Democrat senator until 1964 when he became a Republican.

For over two decades, Connor, a pro-segregationist Alabama Democrat, served as commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, and became known for enforcing racial segregation codes in the city.

Mr. Biden evoked Mr. Connor’s name during his speech Wednesday in Atlanta that sought to convince voters and a handful of Democratic Senators that the upper chamber must pass a pair of partisan election law bills or else filibuster rules to force them through in party-line votes.

“So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” Biden said. “At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be the si— on 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?”

Mr. Biden wants a carve-out of the Senate filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance most legislation, for the bills that would overhaul the nation’s election laws and restore federal oversight of voting law changes in states with a history of discrimination.

Democrats insist the bills are needed to stop voter suppression in GOP-run states. Republicans fought off the legislation all last year, saying Democrats are staging a federal takeover of state elections to give themselves an advantage.