Almost from the moment President Donald Trump recited the oath of office, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., began a quest for Trump’s impeachment. But given Waters’ record of 26 years in Congress (plus a prior 14 years in the California State Assembly), she should worry far more about the possibility of her own impeachment for leadership malpractice.
Here is a summary of some of her greatest hits:
by LARRY ELDER
Maxine Waters condemned the CIA for its alleged role in the creation of the Los Angeles-area drug problem, even though practically every major newspaper – the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post – examined and rejected the charge. During a town hall meeting, Maxine Waters bellowed: “If I never do anything else in this career as a member of Congress, I’m gonna make somebody pay for what they’ve done to my community and to my people!”
The congresswoman’s concern for the drug epidemic affecting “(her) people” apparently begins and ends in front of a microphone. In the ’90s, a joint federal and local Houston DEA task force pursued cocaine-dealing allegations of James Prince, a childhood friend of Maxine Waters’ husband. Waters wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno, calling the investigation racially motivated and demanding an end to the probe. She succeeded. One infuriated local DEA agent later publicly stated: “The Justice Department in Washington turned their backs on a good agent and a good investigation. It appears the object was to get them to stop their investigation, and it appears that worked.”
In 1973, former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard shot and killed a New Jersey state trooper. Found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison, Chesimard escaped prison and fled to Cuba. Congress passed a resolution asking Fidel Castro to extradite her, but Waters wrote Castro a letter, urging him to let the “persecuted … political activist” stay in Cuba and likening the cop killer to Martin Luther King, since Chesimard had been “persecuted for her civil rights work”!
Maxine Waters justified the 1992 Los Angeles riots by calling them a “rebellion,” while bellowing, “No justice, no peace.” The violence, she said, was “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.” She defended looters: “There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. Maybe they shouldn’t have done it, but the atmosphere was such that they did it. They are not crooks.” Waters said: “One lady said her children didn’t have any shoes. She just saw those shoes there, a chance for all of her children to have new shoes. G–damn it! It was such a tear-jerker. I might have gone in and taken them for her myself.”
Maxine Waters called President George H.W. Bush a “racist” and refused to apologize for it. She said of the then-sitting president: “I would like to … say … very clearly that I believe George (H.W.) Bush is a racist.” She routinely refers to the Republican Party as “the enemy.” She also referred to Republican former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan as a “plantation owner.” And she once proclaimed: “As far as I’m concerned, the tea party can go straight to hell.”
Waters phoned then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson in 2008, asking his office to meet with financially distressed minority-owned banks. He complied. But most of the bankers in attendance were from OneUnited Bank – a bank in which Waters’ husband owned shares and on whose board he once served. OneUnited asked for a special bailout, and a few months later it received $12 million. This prompted an investigation by the House ethics committee. The basis of the ethics inquiry was why Waters failed to disclose her personal financial interest in the bank bailout. After three years, the committee found no ethics violation, believing Waters’ testimony that she did not know OneUnited was the distressed bank until after the meeting had taken place.
If Waters were a Republican, especially a white male Republican, the media would have long dismissed her as a racist, toxic, divisive demagogue. That the left – because of Waters’ attacks on Trump – takes her seriously says far more about the left than about the president.