“To suggest that lynching would only be a lynching if someone’s heart was pulled out and displayed to someone else is ridiculous,” she added. “The idea that we would not be taking the issue of lynching seriously is an insult - an insult to Senator Booker and Senator Tim Scott and myself,” she said from across the chamber floor, referring to the South Carolina Republican who helped write the bill and is the party’s lone black senator. Paul as she noted that even as they debated, mourners were gathering to honor George Floyd, the African-American man who died last week after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Harris rose to object, delivering a seething broadside against Mr. Paul said that he took lynching seriously, but “this legislation does not.” “Our national history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness of us than that.” “This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion,” he said. Paul argued that the lynching bill was sloppily written and could lead to yet another injustice - excessive sentencing for minor infractions - unless it was revised. Paul sought to narrow the bill’s definition of lynching and push the revised measure through without a formal vote, drawing angry rebukes from two of the bill’s authors, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, both African-American Democrats. The issue erupted on the Senate floor on Thursday afternoon, when Mr. At a time when lawmakers are looking at an array of other, potentially more divisive proposals to respond to a spate of recent killings of black Americans, the impasse illustrates the volatile mix of raw emotion and political division that has often frustrated attempts by Congress to enact meaningful changes in the law when it comes to matters of racial violence. It passed the House this year by a vote of 410 to 4, and has the backing of 99 senators, who have urged support for belated federal recognition of a crime that once terrorized black Americans.īut the private objections of one Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have succeeded for months in preventing it from becoming law. The bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after the 14-year-old black boy who was tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi, predates the recent high-profile deaths of three black men and women at the hands of white police and civilians that have inspired protests across the country. As Congress prepares to wade into a contentious debate over legislation to address police brutality and systemic racial bias, a long-simmering dispute in the Senate over a far less controversial bill that would for the first time explicitly make lynching a federal crime has burst into public view.
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