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Several Democratic senators, including one who remains the preacher at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, joined several clergy members for a vigil in opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on the Capitol steps Tuesday.
“Clergy and leaders in robes, collars and religious vestments will offer prayers, sing songs, read scripture and testify to the Gospel, providing a moral reckoning at this critical moment in history,” read an advisory announcing the vigil obtained by Fox News Digital.
Rev. Jim Wallis, who advised the Obama administration on faith and neighborhood partnerships, told the crowd they “come today in spiritual procession – singing, reading Scripture and coming for a vigil on the Senate steps.”
“Some say that we should keep faith out of politics – we’re saying while the Bible doesn’t give us detailed legislation, it tells us who to care for,” Wallis went on. “We don’t want to let Jesus Christ be left outside the Senate chamber for this vote.”
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Wallis called Republicans’ budget a “big bad bill” that will purportedly “take 60 million [people] off of health care.”
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., cited Luke 10, recalling the passage where a lawyer – “and it’s always a lawyer causing trouble,” he quipped – asks Jesus who qualifies as a neighbor and who one ought to care for.
Coons claimed the GOP bill “literally takes the food from the mouths of hungry children to pass an enormous tax cut for the very wealthiest [and] is the definition of an immoral bill before this Congress.”
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Later, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. – reverend of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – said the vigil felt like “déjà vu.”
Warnock recounted protesting via prayer and singing in the Capitol rotunda in 2017 – alongside former North Carolina NAACP president William Barber II – and said he “drew the short straw” when he, but not Barber, was arrested.
“As I stood there, I said then what I want to say today: That a budget is not just a fiscal document, it’s a moral document.”
“Show me your budget and I’ll show you who you think matters and who does not – who you think is dispensable. Right. And we stood there in 2017 making the same point,” he said, crediting the Capitol Police for arresting them in a professional manner. Warnock recounted that when he was warned of being arrested, he said he had “already been arrested.”
“My mind and my imagination and my heart had been arrested by the heartbeat of children who should not lose their food and who should not lose healthcare in order to give wealthy people a tax cut,” he said, suggesting the same was true with Republicans’ latest budget bill.
“Here I am eight years later, having transformed my agitation into legislation.”
“I’m here today because I still know how to agitate – I still know how to protest. I’m not a senator who used to be a pastor. I’m a pastor in the Senate.”
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