Source: Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty
With the debacle that is President Donald Trump‘s handling of the migrant situation at the border where children were ripped from their parents, the Republican Party needed something to derail the administration’s free fall. Congresswoman Maxine Waters over the weekend gave the GOP the narrative change it desperately needed after she called for protests of all of Trump’s Cabinet members, igniting a debate in Congress with Democrat leadership criticizing the comments.
Over the weekend, Waters was in her home state and delivered a speech where she told attendees to keep up with protests against anyone connected to the Trump administration. While conservative media tried to manipulate Waters’ words as a means to incite violence, the veteran congresswoman never once called for that.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said last Saturday (June 23).
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Waters’ call for protests “Un-American.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, taking a more political stance than Schumer, wrote via Twitter, “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
Rep. Andy Briggs, a Republican representing Arizona, has introduced a measure for calling for Waters to resign, apologize for inciting protests, and release a statement.
Upon returning to the Hill, Waters has pushed back against the criticism, and once more stood her ground in the face of this so-called controversy.
“I believe in peaceful, very peaceful protests,” Waters said to reporters on Capitol Hill. “I have not called for the harm of anybody. This President has lied again when he’s saying that I’ve called for harm.”
Amazingly, none of this passion existed from the GOP against President Trump for his several notable instances of comments that one could perceive as violent and certainly off-color.
And as Congresswoman Waters said in an interview Monday on MSNBC [shared below], the focus should really be on the children and the families at the border which is the responsibility of this current administration to correct and if citizens peacefully protest in the meantime, so be it.
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Photo: Getty
