An anti-Israel reverend who preached at President Joe Biden's inaugural prayer service is demanding a White House meeting to push the administration to abolish the filibuster.
Rev. William Barber, who was arrested alongside Jesse Jackson during an anti-filibuster protest earlier this year, is asking the White House for a sit-down meeting with Biden, according to a letter first reported by the Religion News Service. Barber, who leads the radical George Soros-funded Poor People's Campaign, says in the letter he wants to help Biden pass the $3.5 trillion spending package being debated in Congress.
"For 140 million poor and low-income people in this country, it is incredibly disheartening to hear Democrats who ran on the platform you are advocating say publicly that they do not see the need or the urgency for more investment," Barber wrote in the letter. "We know that need intimately, and we are prepared to bring people to the White House to demonstrate the need."
"We cannot allow the filibuster, which has been used to stall even a conversation about so much important legislation, to block the action that is so desperately needed in this moment," Barber wrote.
The massive spending bill supported by both Barber and the White House does not have the votes needed to pass through the Senate, even if the filibuster was abolished, as Democrats only have 48 members of the Senate behind the bill.
Barber, who Biden has compared to Martin Luther King Jr., has a long record of controversial statements attacking the Jewish state. In 2018, he called Israel an "apartheid state" and said the notion that Israel was created as a response to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust was a lie.
"It was never just purely about righting the terrible wrongs of the Holocaust," Barber said, arguing instead that it was about "expanding a global empire."
During the same speech, Barber said the 2016 presidential election was rigged. He claimed that Donald Trump was "selected, not elected" and that Republicans "hijacked" the Supreme Court because Trump was only president due to a racist Electoral College.
Barber, a black minister, has emerged as a popular surrogate for Democrats as they work to pass H.R. 4, a massive overhaul of how elections are run in America. He appeared alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) in August to argue that the U.S. election system is racist.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.