No more lynching!

The New York Times

(Last of two parts)

John F. Kennedy proposed a civil-rights act in 1963 after violent riots that spring. The bill languished in a Senate committee for months before finally making it out, and was mercilessly filibustered on the floor. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and again, Johnson used that event to help push the bill through.

These are not those days: Donald Trump is no Johnson, in fact on this question of civil rights he may be the antithesis of Johnson, and there are no bills in the pipeline on civil rights that rise to the scale of those previous acts or that directly go to the effective amelioration of what set off these protests in the first place.

Sunday night, Representative Justin Amash announced that he would introduce legislation that would eliminate “qualified immunity,” which shields police and other government officials from being sued when a victim’s civil rights are violated.

That act, good and necessary, is just beginning its legislative journey and will likely come under Senate consideration, should it pass the House, months from now, closer to the election, when politicians are leery of taking touchy votes. That is, if the Senate takes it up at all. There are hundreds of acts already passed by the House that the Senate has refused to take up, and some of them do speak to the issue of equality, broadly speaking.

There is one already under consideration that is important and meaningful: The anti-lynching bill, which is stalled in the Senate. Rand Paul acknowledged on Wednesday that he is holding up the legislation because of the way it is written, it might “conflate lesser crimes with lynching.”

Oh, like putting your knee on a man’s neck instead of a noose?

One could strongly argue that George Floyd was lynched, in broad daylight, for the world to see, his body just going limp horizontally instead of vertically.

The anti-lynching bill wouldn’t end police brutality or white supremacy. It wouldn’t establish equality or eliminate oppression. We need many more bills in many different areas to do that.

But the passage of this bill would stand as a point of possibility that the government can be responsive, that things can change and that cruelty will be punished.

The House already passed a version of the bill, and the Senate another — two years ago(!) — and the two versions simply need to be reconciled.

It took the House a hundred years to pass an antilynching bill. This moment feels like a perfect one to finish this work.