Sen. Tim Scott plans to address concerns about anti-lynching legislation raised by Sen. Rand Paul, in an attempt to move forward the legislation while police reform proposals are also in the works.
“I need to talk to Rand Paul about his concerns, to be honest with you. We’ve passed it twice out of the Senate,” Scott, one of three authors of the anti-lynching bill, told the Washington Examiner.
“I think we can get it through again, and if we can make necessary surgical incisions and make it a stronger vote, we will. If we can’t, then I think we should be willing to move forward,” said Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican member.
Scott added he hopes to work with Paul to make the bill “easier to digest” for the Kentucky Republican.
Scott’s comments come as Senate Republicans say they are working on a comprehensive proposal to respond to racially motivated police misconduct and other reforms to the criminal justice system. Scott is leading the effort, GOP lawmakers said Tuesday.
The anti-lynching measure, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, which passed the Senate in June 2018, was previously pushed by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California and Scott. But the proposal, like all the lingering bills, died at the end of the last Congress.
The bill remained in limbo for more than a year into the new Democratic House majority, until lawmakers there passed separate anti-lynching legislation on Feb. 26 by a 410-4 vote.
That measure includes a provision that would establish lynching as a federal crime. The House bill is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store.
Paul took issue with the House bill as it was written, he said, because it might “conflate lesser crimes with lynching” that produced bruises or other minor wounds resulting from a fight between two people.
Harris and Booker expressed strong displeasure at that move and his desire to amend the House-passed version.
“It still gets me that they want to force something on the Emmett Till bill that they’re not willing to discuss making it a better bill. If they were willing to discuss that, it would go a long way towards trying to get people like me, who have always been on the side of criminal justice, on their side,” Paul told reporters.
“But if they’re just going to make big speeches and condemn me and call me a racist, or whatever they want to call me, how do they expect to get anything done?” Paul said.
Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, is optimistic the anti-lynching bill will eventually find passage again.
“I think the quickest way to do that is to include it in a larger, must-pass piece of legislation,” Cornyn said.
