Updated at 5:20 p.m. with comments from Gohmert challenger Hank Gilbert

East Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert cast one of just four no votes Wednesday as the U.S. House approved historic legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime.

The vote was 410-4.

Gohmert, a Tyler Republican, said afterward in a floor speech that he couldn’t support a “ridiculous” 10-year prison term for lynching as provided for in the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named for a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi.

Such serious crimes should be prosecuted under state murder statutes, he said, and subject to the death penalty as in Texas.

But for more than a century, a key impetus for a federal ban on lynching has been to allow federal law enforcement to step in when local police don’t.

All other Texans supported the measure, including 22 Republicans and 13 Democrats.

“I had to look at the calendar and see if it was 2020 or 1920 when I saw that vote," said Democrat Hank Gilbert, a Tyler businessman and rancher hoping to unseat Gohmert in November. “It is unconscionable that a sitting congressman would not vote to make lynching a federal crime.”

East Texas, like Dallas, has an infamous history of racially motivated killings. In 1998, three white men in Jasper — south of Gohmert’s district — kidnapped James Byrd Jr., 49. One of the men had a tattoo of a black man hanging from a tree, They chained Byrd to a pickup truck and dragged him three miles.

In 2001, then-Gov. Rick Perry signed the state’s James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Law.

Gohmert noted in his House speech Wednesday that two of Byrd’s killers received the death penalty and the other got life in prison, showing, he said, that ordinary criminal statutes suffice regardless of motive.

“I have trouble with the federal nexus with lynching,” he said.

“I am someone who has looked two defendants in the eye and sentenced them to death,” said Gohmert, a former trial judge. “It’s a very somber, serious thing to do but those crimes justified it…. I couldn’t vote for this. A 10-year maximum when we’re talking about lynching?”

Gohmert has long opposed hate crime legislation, arguing that carve-outs meant to protect gays and lesbians, for instance, infringe on free speech rights and put Christians at risk of persecution. In any case, he has argued, the violence itself— assault or murder—is already a crime.

After a mass shooting in El Paso last Aug. 3 that left 22 people dead, mostly Hispanics, Gohmert cited the Jasper murder in arguing against hate crime legislation.

“The poster case they made for the hate crime federally was the case down in Jasper. They were tried under Texas law," he said in an interview with Tyler TV station KETK, noting that the killers ended up receiving the death penalty. "All of this screaming, `Yeah, we need to punish them for hate crimes,' you know, that’s just gonna be something used to lock up preachers someday. But, we should punish people for what they actually do, and not for something stupid that they say or may have crossed their mind.”

The other three no votes Wednesday came from Reps. Justin Amash of Michigan, an independent who resigned from the Republican Party last July over differences with the president, and two other conservatives, GOP Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ted Yoho of Florida.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., authored a nearly identical bill —it’s not named after Till —that drew 47 co-sponsors, including 16 Republicans, a list that did not include Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote on March 22— 120 years after a House committee first quashed an effort to make lynching a federal crime.

After years of lobbying, in 1922, the House approved a bill from Rep. Leonidas Dyer, a Missouri Republican, to make lynching a federal crime. But that effort was filibustered in the Senate.

Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., authored the current House bill, which is expected to go to the president’s desk later this week.

Sixteen House members did not vote: 10 Democrats and six Republicans.