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As Congress prepares to wade into a contentious debate over legislation to address police brutality and systemic racial bias, a long-simmering dispute in the Senate over a far less controversial bill that would for the first time explicitly make lynching a federal crime has burst into public view.

The bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after the 14-year-old black teen from Chicago who was tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi, predates the recent high-profile deaths of three black men and women at the hands of white police and civilians that have inspired protests across the country. It passed the House this year by a vote of 410-4 and has the backing of 99 senators, who have urged support for belated federal recognition of a crime that once terrorized black Americans.

But the private objections of one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have succeeded for months in preventing it from becoming law. At a time when lawmakers are looking at an array of other, potentially more divisive proposals to respond to a spate of recent killings of black Americans, the impasse illustrates the volatile mix of raw emotion and political division that has often frustrated attempts by Congress to enact meaningful changes in the law when it comes to matters of racial violence.

The issue erupted on the Senate floor Thursday, when Paul sought to narrow the bills definition of lynching and push the revised measure through without a formal vote, drawing angry rebukes from two of the bills authors, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, both black Democrats.

Paul argued that the lynching bill was sloppily written and could lead to yet another injustice excessive sentencing for minor infractions unless it was revised.

This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion, he said. Our national history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness of us than that.

Paul said that he takes lynching seriously, but this legislation does not.

Harris rose to object, delivering a seething broadside against Paul as she noted that even as they debated, mourners were gathering to honor George Floyd, the black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

The idea that we would not be taking the issue of lynching seriously is an insult an insult to Senator Booker and Senator Tim Scott and myself, she said on the chamber floor, referring to the South Carolina Republican who helped write the bill and is the GOPs lone black senator.

To suggest that lynching would only be a lynching if someones heart was pulled out and displayed to someone else is ridiculous, she added. It should not require a maiming or torture for us to recognize a lynching when we see it and recognize it by federal law and call it what it is, which is that it is a crime that should be punishable with accountability and consequence.

At issue is what, exactly, counts as lynching under federal law. The bill would add a new section called lynching to the civil rights statute to deal with group violence meant to intimidate people of color or other protected groups. The offense would be classified as a conspiracy by two or more people to cause bodily harm in connection with a hate crime, with penalties up to life in prison if convicted. Paul proposed to raise the bar beyond the standard in federal hate crimes statutes, to serious bodily injury, so that only crimes involving conspiracy to cause substantial risk of death and extreme physical pain could be charged as lynching, according to aides.

Such crimes can already be considered hate crimes under state and federal law. But the term lynching has deep historical significance, and the fact that it has never been formally outlawed has been an enduring symbol of Congress inability to fully reckon with the nations history of racial violence. The issue has taken on even greater significance in recent days.

Harris called the recent killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man jogging in Georgia who was chased down and shot by white men, a modern lynching. In court Thursday, one of the men charged with murder in the case said he heard another use a racial slur as Arbery lay dying.

Members of Congress have been fighting in one way or another to pass federal anti-lynching laws for more than a century, introducing nearly 200 such bills in the first half of the 20th century.

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Sen. Rand Paul holds up anti-lynching legislation - Minneapolis Star Tribune