Watch: Brooklyn Congressman's Chilling Response to Republicans Still Embracing the Confederate Flag

This morning in the wee hours, South Carolina’s House of Representatives approved a bill that would remove the Confederate flag from state Capitol grounds.

But on U.S. Congress floor, the flag still has its defenders.

Earlier today, Republican Rep. Ken Calvert tacked a last-minute amendment onto a bill that would have removed the Confederate flag from from federal sites and gift shops. He and other Republicans wanted the flag to still be allowed to fly at federal cemeteries.

The man who proposed the original flag ban — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who represents large swaths of Brooklyn in U.S. Congress — had some chilling words for his fellow politicians.

“Had this Confederate battle flag prevailed in war 150 years ago, I would not be standing here today as a member of the United States Congress,” he said, clearly emotional.

“I would be here as a slave.”

Rep. Jeffries said that although America has come a long way since the Civil War, the recent church shooting in South Carolina is proof that a white-supremacist mentality persists.

“When Dylann Roof committed this act of terror, his emblem was the Confederate flag,” he said. Rep. Jeffries criticized House Republicans for introducing an amendment to his bill banning the flag “in the dead of night, under cover of darkness.”

If waving the Confederate flag is an American tradition, he said, “I’m perplexed. What exactly is the tradition of the Confederate flag? Is it slavery? Rape? Kidnap? Treason? Genocide?”

Rep. Jeffries called the flag’s red coloring ”a painful reminder of the blood that was shed by African-American slaves who were beaten, raped, lynched and killed here in America as a result of the institution of slavery.”

He told Republicans not to bend to extremist members of their party and constituency.

“We have an opportunity today to make a definitive statement,” he said. “To be leaders — not individuals who cower in fear of some narrow-minded Americans who aren’t aware that the South lost the war 150 years ago.”