[American Thinker] When most Americans think of lynching, they summon images of the horrific murders of American blacks, particularly in the years of the Jim Crow South. To describe such murders as "bias-motivated acts of terror," as Cory Booker has, would certainly be accurate. "This bill," Booker says, "will not undo the damage," but it "will acknowledge the wrongs in our history. It will honor the memories of those brutally killed."So, when Senate Democrats offered their proposed new law, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018, I had assumed that it would be a symbolic congressional action to recognize these injustices that took place and to honor the victims. Considering that the act passed the Senate unanimously, that's likely what most senators also believed.
But that's not what the act is, and that's certainly not its intent. The real purpose of the act appears to be the legal redefining of the word "lynching" to include a include a much broader scope of lesser crimes, and to grow the federal government's power to prosecute these lesser crimes that it includes in its new definition.
Lynching is not a problem in the United States anymore, and the language of the act affirms that fact unequivocally. The act cites that at least "4,742 people, predominantly black African-Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968."