The United States Senate passed a bill Monday evening that makes lynching a federal hate crime, a measure that finally passed the chamber after numerous attempts, the New York Times reports.  The bill will now go to the White House where President Biden is expected to sign it into law.

“Although no legislation will reverse the pain and fear felt by those victims, their loved ones and Black communities, this legislation is a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history,” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey and a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement Monday.

“This is the year, now is the time, that we do the right thing,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolinain a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.  “Not for Republicans or Democrats, but for Americans who’ve watched, with bewildered eyes and confused hearts, their government fall short on issues of importance to them again and again and again.  Let this year be the year we put politics to the side and we get it done.”

For more than a century, politicians have tried to pass a law to criminalize lynching on a federal level, but they’ve been blocked by conservatives who feared doing so would enflame their racist backers.  The first attempt was made in 1900 by George Henry White, a North Carolina House Republican who was the only Black man in Congress at the time; the bill never made it to the floor of the House.

The latest roadblock was Kentucky Republican Senator (and stand-in for Beaker from the Muppets) Rand Paul who declared the legislation overly-broad, and therefore filibustered it.