If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.

Horowitz is making a partisan, corrective claim about credit and blame in U.S. memory politics: he argues that the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday—and thus the recurring calendar coincidence of MLK Day with presidential inaugurations—should be attributed to Ronald Reagan rather than to Democrats in the late Carter era. The quote implies that popular narratives often assign moral or political ownership of civil-rights commemorations to Democrats, whereas Horowitz insists the decisive institutional act was Reagan’s signature and that earlier Democratic congressional efforts failed. The broader significance is less about King himself than about how symbolic holidays become contested evidence in arguments over party identity, historical responsibility, and the shaping of civic ritual.