House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Sen. Cory Booker host a sit-in on Capitol steps over the GOP budget plan

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., hosted hundreds of supporters at the Capitol on Sunday, sitting on the steps in protest of Republicans’ upcoming push to pass a budget reconciliation bill they hope will cut $1.5 trillion in federal spending.

“That bill, we believe, presents one of the greatest moral threats to our country that we’ve seen in terms of what it will do to providing food for the hungry, care for the elderly, services for the disabled, health care, health care for the sick and more,” Booker said at the beginning of the sit-in.

Democrats have for months warned that House Republicans’ budget blueprint would lead to over $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, a federal program that provides health insurance for low-income families.

Booker and Jeffries spoke at the beginning of the sit-in, which began around 6 a.m., about their religious upbringings, saying they would usually be attending services on Sunday morning but instead were hosting the conversation on the Capitol steps.

“Martin Luther King said, ‘Budgets are moral documents,’ and that’s the spirit we come here with this morning,” Booker said before he urged supporters to join the two men online or in person.

The New Jersey senator called on supporters to “give your own testimony to your moral urgency that you feel, to maybe your faith traditions or moral traditions that … motivate you at this moment to speak out, maybe share your story of what the threat of this bill does to you and your lives.”

Early in the day, Jeffries also pointed out that they were hosting the sit-in on Booker’s birthday. After wishing the senator a happy birthday, the minority leader told him, “I’m sure you didn’t expect last year, when thinking about this birthday, that I would be your birthday date in this location, but this of course is the moment that we find ourselves in.”

Jeffries also brought a message for House Republicans, saying, “Enough. This is not America. We will continue to show up, speak up and stand up until we end this national nightmare.”

Ahead of Monday, when congressional lawmakers will return from a two-week recess, Jeffries said Democrats were preparing to face “an existential struggle to defeat Republican efforts to try to jam a very reckless budget down the throats of the American people.”

Dozens joined Jeffries and Booker on the Capitol steps, where they sat in the sunshine for over nine hours speaking about their faith traditions and the upcoming budget fight.

Some were rank-and-file supporters of congressional Democrats, while others were higher-profile progressive leaders, like Maya Wiley, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“The [budget] cuts, when we’re talking about cuts, people bleed and we should put names behind them,” Wiley told the crowd. “You know, Sarah in South Dakota had a son who has seizures one to five times a day, had to quit her job to try to save her son. It is Medicaid that helps pay for her health care to do that. Or Jasmine in Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, with two kids, who was taking care of other people’s children when she fell and became disabled, and it’s Medicaid that was taking care of her.”

Several faith leaders and fellow Democratic lawmakers, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., also spoke over the course of the sit-in, which was still ongoing Sunday afternoon.

Booker is no stranger to speaking for hours in opposition to Republicans and the Trump administration.

Earlier this month, he stood on the Senate floor and spoke for over 25 hours against the Trump administration, breaking the record for the longest speech in Senate history.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News: