Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 35

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. 35, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, as amended. I seek to amend this legislation not because I take lynching lightly but because I take it seriously, and this legislation does not.

Lynching is a tool of terror that claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 Americans between 1881 and 1968, but this bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion. Our Nation's history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness from us than that.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in his autobiography about the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia. Du Bois wrote that, after the lynching, Hose's knuckles were viewed on display at a store on Mitchell Street in Atlanta. His liver and heart were even presented to the Governor of Georgia as a souvenir.

Sickening, grotesque--the images of lynching.

In 1931, Raymond Gunn was lynched in Maryville, MO. The spectacle drew a crowd of almost 4,000 people, including, if you can believe it, women and their children. In the tragedy of lynching, the author writes that one woman even held her little girl up so high so she could better see the victim who was ``blazing on the roof.''

Sickening and grotesque, these images.

In the summer of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was visiting family in Money, MS, when he went to a country store and bought some candy. While in there, he was accused of flirting with a White woman, and for that offense, Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night and bludgeoned so badly that, afterward, his body was unrecognizable. He could only be identified by the ring he was wearing. After seeing her son's remains, his mother insisted on having an open casket funeral so the whole world could see what the killers had done to her son.

We must remember the murders of Emmett Till, Raymond Gunn, Sam Hose, and the thousands of others whose lives were destroyed by the barbarity of the lynch mob, but this bill will not do that. This bill would expand the meaning of ``lynching'' to include any bodily injury, including a cut, an abrasion, or a bruise, physical pain, illness, or any other injury to the body, no matter how temporary.

Words have meaning. It would be a disgrace for the Congress of the United States to declare that a bruise is lynching, that an abrasion is lynching, that any injury to the body, no matter how temporary, is on par with the atrocities done to people like Emmett Till, Raymond Gunn, and Sam Hose, who were killed for no reason but because they were Black. To do that would demean their memories and cheapen the historic and horrific legacy of lynching in our country.

As Congressman Amash stated, ``To be clear, the bill does not make lynching a new Federal hate crime. Murdering someone on account of their race or conspiring to do so is now illegal under Federal law. It is already a Federal crime, and it is already a hate crime.''

He is right. We have had Federal hate crime statutes for over 50 years, and it has been a Federal hate crime to murder someone because of his race for over a decade. Additionally, murder is already a crime in 50 States. In fact, rather than considering a good-intentioned but symbolic bill, the Senate could immediately consider addressing qualified immunity and ending police militarization.

We can and must do better. That is why no one in the Senate has been more involved in criminal justice reform than I have. No one has introduced more criminal justice reform bills. In my time in the Senate, I have authored or cosponsored at least 22 unique criminal justice reform bills. I am acutely aware of the injustices perpetrated year in and year out in our cities, but reform needs to be more than window dressing.

That is why I am on the floor today to offer the expedited passage-- pass it today--of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, as amended. Lynching is a particularly vicious kind of murder, and a Federal law should treat it as such. For these reasons, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act should be adopted with my amendment, which would apply the criminal penalties for lynching only and not for other crimes.

35, which was received by the House. I ask unanimous consent that my amendment at the desk be agreed to, that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. PAUL. I think it is important to know and let the record show that I have been working with Senator Booker's office for 3 months on the amendment of this bill; that I am willing to have unanimous passage of the bill today, but I think it is incredibly important that we get this right.

A Black woman in New Jersey assaulted three Jewish women and slapped them. It was terrible. She uttered racial epithets about these Jewish women. She was charged with third-degree misdemeanor assault with up to 1 year in prison, which to me sounds pretty significant for slapping, but she was then charged with a hate crime in addition to that, which was 4 years in addition.

If slapping someone and hurling racial epithets gets you 10 years in prison, this is exactly what we have been fighting about in criminal justice reform. We set up a system and didn't pay attention to the penalties, and all of a sudden things we didn't intend happened. So we have to be smart about this.

I am willing to pass the bill today, as amended, which would simply say not that you even have to harm someone--you have to attempt to harm them, but it has to be an attempt to harm them.

So all the discussion about bruising while trying to lynch someone-- yes, that is attempted murder. It would be covered by this bill. Nothing in the bill would stop or prevent the prosecution of heinous behavior. That is what it is intended for

What I am trying to do is to make sure we don't get unintended consequences. We fought the battle against mandatory minimums for a decade now because we tie up people in sentencing that makes no sense. Ten years for slapping someone would be an abomination, and it could happen to anyone. Do we want a Black woman who slapped three Jewish women in New Jersey to get 10 years in prison? If there is a group of them, it is now a conspiracy to lynch.

We have to use some common sense here. We should not have a 10-year prison sentence for anything less than, at the very least, an attempt to do bodily harm. The statute lists what bodily harm is, but it could still be an attempt. It doesn't mean you actually have to have it, but what it would preclude is when somebody shoves somebody in a bar and they fall down and have an abrasion and they say: ``He did it because of a racial animus toward me,'' and then you have a 10-year penalty. That is not right.

All of us are advocates on the same side of criminal justice reform. We have all argued on the same side that the law is screwed up and has incarcerated too many people unfairly. That is what I am trying to prevent here. So the point is, I understand the emotions about this. Do you think I take great joy in being here? No. I am the sponsor of 22 criminal justice bills. Do you think I am getting any good publicity on this? No. I will be excoriated by simpleminded people on the internet who think I don't like Emmett Till or appreciate the history and the memory of Emmett Till. I will be lectured to by everybody that I have got no right to have an opinion on any of these things, and I should be quiet.

But we cannot just not read our bills. I have worked in an honest way with Senator Booker's office for 3 months on this bill. We have gone back and forth. We gave them some language. They came back to us and said it wouldn't work, and I said: What about this, and we haven't gotten any more responses. We haven't gotten responses back in a month or more.

The situation now is they are litigating in the press and trying to accuse me of being in favor of something so heinous that it makes my skin crawl and makes me sick to my stomach to even read the accounts about what happened.

But we also ought to be fair and honest about this. Lynching is illegal. People who say there is no Federal law against lynching are not telling the truth. The law says that if you kill somebody and you have racial animus, under the hate crimes statute, it is illegal. You can't do that. It is also illegal in all the States. This bill does not make lynching illegal. So for all the discussion of that, this bill creates a new crime called conspiracy to lynch. Oh, yes, I am for it. If there is a crowd, let's arrest the whole mob. All four policemen should be responsible for what happened to Mr. Floyd.

The thing is, when we do that, we have to be careful that we don't then put a crowd of people in where someone pushed into someone or someone slapped someone.

There has to be justice. People are chanting ``justice.'' Justice has to have a brain and has to have vision and can't be hamstrung into something that could give someone 10 years in prison for a minor crime.

This is a very minor attempt. Everything we left in here we have worked with Senator Booker's office to make sure it is inclusive. They came back and said: What about attempted? We said: Let's change the language. So we have in there ``attempt to cause serious bodily harm.''

So there could be no injury, but someone will have to have a discussion of whether there was an attempt and it was an attempt that looked like it would be serious. So I think slapping someone isn't, but under the current statute as is--people say: Ah, nobody will ever do it. Maybe, but we are putting it on the books.

The mandatory minimums have kept people in jail for decades. There are people who have life for nonviolent crimes. All of us have worked on the same side of that issue.

I am asking for a very minor change. I will pass it right now. I am completely out of the way. I am for the bill. I am asking unanimous consent to pass the bill today with one amendment that just says let's be careful not to arrest people for slapping someone or not arrest somebody for pushing into someone and get them 10 years in prison.

This isn't about someone trying to kill another person or someone attempting bodily harm. Those people would be included in this language even if they did not have a mark on the person. But if they were rounding him up, tying him up, and they had thrown a rope over a tree, that is attempted murder. They would still be included under this bill, even without a mark on them.

What we have to preclude and what we are trying to preclude is that the bill doesn't get used for the wrong purposes. We are all on the same side about whom we want to punish and whom we should prevent. We are also on the same side on the symbolism of this, but we can't pass laws that do exactly what all of us have said is wrong with our penal system, all of the unintended consequences. There is one here, and I ask, in a very polite way--I have been asking for 3 months--for one small change, and I will let the bill go today, on this day, if we can have it.

The changes have been out there. They are not brand-new. They have been in Senator Booker's office for 3 months. We have tried to, as he has had objections, work with him on his objections.

So I would ask unanimous consent, once again, to pass the bill, as amended.

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