Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush criticized Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for blocking an anti-lynching bill from passing in the Senate.
Rush, a Democrat, called Paul, a Republican, a “scoundrel” after the senator blocked an anti-lynching bill because he believes it could be wrongly applied to escalate charges during minor altercations. During an interview with Axios on Friday, Rush said he believes Paul’s decision to block the bill could haunt his legacy.
“I think he’s acting as a scoundrel here. I think he’ll be treated and defined as a scoundrel that’s standing in the pathway, standing in the doorway of passing a federal anti-lynching bill, after over 100 years of attempting to pass an anti-lynching bill,” Rush said.
Paul said Thursday that he is fearful that the anti-lynching bill, as it is written, could result in someone facing 10 years in federal prison for leaving someone with “minor bruising.” He said such legislation would “conflate lesser crimes with lynching,” and be a “disservice to those who were lynched in our history.”
“We don’t think that’s appropriate, and someone has to read these bills and make sure they do what they say they’re going to do rather than it be just a big PR effort, and then everybody gets up in arms and wants to beat up anybody who wants to read the bill and actually make the bill strong,” he said.
Paul offered an amendment that would require that the victim of the crime meets the “serious bodily injury standard” that already exists in Congress. That standard requires that the victim suffers “substantial risk of death and extreme physical pain” in order for the crime to meet the threshold of being considered a lynching under the new legislation.
Rush said Paul’s changes would “gut” the bill which already passed in the House with a vote of 410-4.
“I think he’s trying to gut the bill,” Rush said. “I really believe he’s trying to gut the bill, and the bill is a compromise. It’s not my original wording. Not in the spirit that I originally constructed in my House bill, but I was willing to compromise, and we came up with this compromise. Even with all of that, Rand Paul wants to gut the bill.”
Rush said he believes that if the bill does not pass now, it will never pass. The nation has been witnessing protests for more than a week following the death of George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest.
“I’m an optimist. I’m a praying man. I really believe that this bill has reached a moment, lending a confluence of history coming together at this time. That there’s going to be a public outcry to the fact that this bill has not really passed, and there’s no federal legislation in this time against lynching,” Rush said.
Rush said he plans to introduce a new bill in the House that would qualify the circumstances of Floyd’s death as a lynching and allow for punishment of officers involved in future incidents. The exact details of the bill are expected to be released as soon as next week.
“All the elements that were present in Emmett Till’s lynching were present in George Floyd’s lynching. Every one of them. The only thing that was missing — well, there wasn’t anything missing. The normal idea or perception of a lynching is a tree and a rope. But they didn’t have a tree and a rope. They had, with George Floyd, they had a knee on the neck. Not a tree and a rope,” Rush said.
“But the fact of it is that you had multiple participants. The fact that he was asphyxiated, lost his breath, that is model lynching,” he said, later adding, “They, in fact, are acting as a lynch mob in the example of George Floyd.”
