Two decades into the 21st century, what could be simpler than declaring that lynching should be a federal offense? Yet even amid the racial strife shaking America lately, Sen. Rand Paul still doesn't get it. The Kentucky Republican has put a hold on anti-lynching legislation that has otherwise drawn wide bipartisan support.

Paul says he wants to "make the bill better," but what he's doing is threatening to derail this long-awaited gesture right when it's needed most. Lynching — extrajudicial killing often (though not exclusively) by hanging — is America's original homegrown terrorism. After the Civil War, all the way through the Civil Rights movement, it was an all-but-official mob response to black empowerment, and not just in the Deep South.

Alabama's Tuskegee Institute estimates more than 4,700 lynchings were committed in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968, the overwhelming majority against African Americans. Police were often accessories; courts and politicians were complicit. The public, for generations, tolerated it. Lynching stands with slavery itself as among America's worst atrocities.

There have been about 200 failed attempts over the past century to pass a statute specifying lynching as a federal offense. Even after 14-year-old Emmett Till's mother publicly displayed his mutilated body in Chicago in 1955 to show the world what a Mississippi lynching had done to her son, Congress refused to act.

That is, finally, on the cusp of changing. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed the House in February with just four "no" votes, an extraordinary show of unity in these polarized times. The Republican-controlled Senate had earlier passed a similar measure and appeared poised to pass it again.

But in an astonishing display of tone-deafness, Paul is using his prerogative as a senator to prevent the legislation from being called. Paul has actually been holding up the bill for months, but it was only after National Journal revealed that fact this week that he publicly articulated his reasoning: He claims the bill would allow lesser crimes to be "conflated" with lynching. That's a strained, unsupported stance that most of Paul's fellow Republicans don't appear to agree with.

Those who think this is much ado about a crime that no longer happens aren't paying attention. While George Floyd's horrific death in Minneapolis police custody might not meet the technical definition of a lynching, the killing in Georgia of black jogger Ahmaud Arbery — allegedly by three white men who stalked and shot him — certainly could. And in any case, there's a broader point: Specifying lynching as a federal crime would be an important symbolic statement against racial injustice in all its forms.

Paul has a history of obstruction and grandstanding, but this time, he has picked a battle that's both philosophically indefensible and hurtful to a nation that's already hurting enough. He should stand down.

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