Even after Senator Tim Scott got Mitch McConnell to agree in advance to allow 20 Democrat amendments to his police reform bill, which included an anti-lynching portion, the Democrats killed the bill by filibuster. Now, if you have been paying a bit of attention to history, this might sound familiar. Yes, indeed, there is a long and ugly history, in the Progressive Era, of Democrat senators filibustering anti-lynching laws every time they came to the Senate floor, and of the Republican leaders not changing the rule to stop this facilitation of race-based political terrorism. Meet the new Senate, same as the old Senate.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, states and local governments controlled by white supremacist Democrats blocked blacks from serving on juries and reliability acquitted white men if officials even felt a need to hold a trial over the killing of a black man. The original intent of federal anti-lynching laws was to bypass white supremacist controlled state and local governments, stopping them from providing legal cover, from holding occasional trials of white killers of black men and always acquitting them. It was the norm in segregated states to pervert justice in this way. The point now is some sort of symbolism, as current federal civil rights law already provides ways to prosecute and no jurisdiction has anything like the poisonous conditions of Jim Crow.