The Emmett Till Bill

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. 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.

But the private objections of one Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have succeeded for months in preventing it from becoming law. 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.

The issue erupted on the Senate floor on Thursday afternoon, when Mr. 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

At issue is what, exactly, counts as lynching under federal law. The bill would add a new section called “lynching” to the civil rights statute to deal with group violence meant to intimidate people of color or other protected groups. The offense would be classified as a conspiracy by two or more people to cause bodily harm in connection with a hate crime, with penalties up to life in prison if convicted. Mr. Paul proposed to raise the bar beyond the standard in federal hate crimes statutes, to “serious bodily injury,” so that only crimes involving conspiracy to cause “substantial risk of death and extreme physical pain” could be charged as lynching, according to aides.