Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) delivered a stirring message to those who have rejected changing the filibuster, asserting that his colleagues have exposed where they would stand amid the 1960s civil rights movement.

Warnock joined The View on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, during which Joy Behar called out Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) for rejecting filibuster change, which essentially made it impossible for President Joe Biden to pass his voting rights agenda.

“You’ve called this a moral issue, not a political issue. But it comes down really, to math, doesn’t it? Democrats don’t have the votes to change the filibuster rules and pass these important pieces of legislation. Is there any convincing these holdouts?” she asked, adding, “What are these people protecting?”

Behar went on to call the divide in the Senate an “emergency situation,” further asking Warnock how Democrats can ensure the preservation of voting rights in the United States.

Warnock responded with harsh criticism of those who continue to oppose Biden’s voting rights push, arguing that they would have been on the wrong side of history:

Well, you know, as you might imagine, as the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, people ask me all the time, especially this time of year as we celebrate his birth, ‘What would Dr. King have done? Where would he stand in a moment like this?’ And especially people like me, born after the civil rights movement, we ask ourselves what would we have done then? I submit members of the senate, regardless of their party, no longer have to ask what we would have done then. We’re doing whatever we would have done then right now. This is a moral moment. This is a 1965 moment, because what they’ve done is they have removed the protections that we secured in 1965, and we’ve seen the mushrooming in all of these terrible voter suppression laws all across the country.

The senator went on to argue that Jim Crow laws lasted so long after slavery ended in the United States due to arguments around procedures and precedents in U.S. politics.

“Somehow the humanity of the most marginalized members of our country got lost in the mix of these process arguments. Process cannot trump what is right, what is true, what is holy, what is noble,” he added. “We have the tools to do it. It’s a defining moral moment in America and everybody needs to show where they stand.”

“Our country is on the brink of peril,” he concluded. “History is watching and our children are counting on us to get this right.”

Watch above, via ABC.

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