*President Barack Obama has signed the “Emmett Till Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016,” which aims to reopen unsolved civil rights cases, Vibe.com reports.
The bill is an update of a previous version of the same name that was passed by the House of Representatives in 2007. This bill expansion now allows both the Department of Justice and the FBI to bring to justice those who committed crimes prior to 1970.
Obama is calling upon both agencies to “investigate and prosecute criminal civil rights violations that occurred before 1980 and resulted in a death.”
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According to a White House summary, the bill calls on both agencies to support the “full accounting of all victims whose deaths or disappearances were the result of racially motivated crimes” and “hold accountable under federal and state law individuals who were perpetrators of, or accomplices in, unsolved civil rights murders and disappearances.”
Federal agencies must also meet regularly with civil rights organizations and various DOJ-designated entities to facilitate information sharing about the status of their work. Families must also be regularly updated about the status of the investigations.
Meanwhile, Obama believes he would have defeated Donald Trump if only the Constitution allowed him to seek a third term.
“I am confident in [my progressive] vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could have mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama told his former top adviser David Axelrod on Axelrod’s podcast, “The Axe Files.”
“I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say, ‘The vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one,’ ” he said.
Trump responded to the statement via his official PR agency, Twitter.com.
“President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! — jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.,” he tweeted Monday afternoon.
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