As President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law today, understand that while this is a huge win for us Black folk, as we've been fighting for centuries in otrder to get lynching classified as a federal crime, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul is also claiming victory by limiting the bill's additions to federal hate crimes to just lynching, as Paul has blocked the legislation like this for his entire Senate career until now. Earlier this month, Morgan Watkins at the Louisville Courier-Journal explained why.
Nearly two years after he received intense criticism for pumping the brakes on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Sen. Rand Paul is co-sponsoring a new version of that legislation and told The Courier Journal he expects the Senate will unanimously pass it.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced the bipartisan legislation this week. Paul, R-Ky., said he’ll be cosponsoring it, too.
The bill would classify lynching as a federal hate crime and is named in honor of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose horrific death catalyzed the civil rights movement.
"I think it's great to have the legislation, you know, to remember Emmett Till but also to remember a terrible time in our history and to know that we're a better place and a better people now," Paul told The Courier Journal in an exclusive interview Monday.
After a year or so of impasse over the legislation, Paul said staff from his office and Booker's started negotiating closely a couple of weeks ago about how to get a compromise done. He also said he was pleased to have worked with both Booker and Scott on strengthening this proposal.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed its own updated version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, Monday night. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., was one of just three lawmakers who voted against it.
Massie, who also voted against the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020, tweeted Monday about his reasons for doing so again, including concerns about expanding federal hate crime laws.
"A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for “hate” tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech," Massie said.
Paul noted he got a lot of grief in the summer of 2020 for his handling of the initial anti-lynching bill, as racial justice protests emerged across the nation after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd.
"It wasn't a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do," he told The Courier Journal. "And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that's not lynching.
"We just wanted to make sure that the punishment was proportional to the crime, and I guess it's just good news that it finally worked out," he added.
The new bill would add lynching to the federal hate crimes statute and would subject someone to up to 30 years in prison if their actions result in the death or serious bodily harm of another person or result in the attempted or actual kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse or killing of another person because of that individual's race or another protected characteristic.
The 2020 version of the bill also would have classified lynching as a federal hate crime, but it would have included certain crimes under that classification that involved defacing religious property or preventing someone from exercising their religious beliefs or engaging in other federally protected activities, such as voting.
And that's the thing that Paul objected to: causing grievous bodily harm to somebody for being Black is a hate crime (and even that took years to talk him into) but defacing a Black church or stopping someone Black from engaging in voting for being Black is too much and we can't punish that as a hate crime.
Better than Thomas Massie, who wants hate crimes done away with completely because it's free speech to shoot a ni-CLANG.
NKY is the most racist area in the country at times, I swear.
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