Democratic lawmakers are not split over whether Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., went too far when she urged political activists to harass members of the Trump administration. The hedging that you’ve seen this weekend is no more complicated than loyal party operatives stalling to see how their congressional leaders would respond.
On Monday, the Democratic rank and file got their answer — and their marching orders.
House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was the first to lay down the marker against Waters, saying on 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.”
Later that afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “No one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right, that’s not American.”
The message here is clear: Don’t hand the opposition ammunition, especially with the November midterm elections just four months away.
Waters, for her part, has not backed down from when she told a rally Saturday, “[I]f you see anybody from [the Trump] 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.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was driven out of a Mexican restaurant on June 19 by members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Similarly, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Lexington, Va., this weekend by a store owner who characterizes the current administration as “inhuman.”
Waters also told MSNBC this weekend, “[T]hese members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they are not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop in a department store. The people are going turn on them, they are going protest, they’re going absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.’”
When the congresswoman’s remarks went viral, the first in her party to field questions about her weekend performance responded by saying a whole lot of nothing.
“Yes, you should protest. Yes, you should confront evil and injustice,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said prior to Schumer’s statement. “But do it in the ways that Martin Luther King did … Recognizing the dignity of even those who you oppose, even those who are trying to destroy you.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., also said prior to the Senate minority leader’s statements that he doesn’t think “people should be harassed. But as a public official, I can tell you when I go out to eat at a restaurant, people come up to me and share their opinions and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., who spoke prior to anything said by Pelosi or Schumer, similarly shied away from stating whether he believed the congresswoman crossed the line.
“Maxine Waters is entitled to her opinion and I respect that,” he said. “She has the right to say what she feels, and I support it.”
But with the unambiguous statements this week from Pelosi and Schumer, expect to see Democrats’ earlier hemming and hawing give way to much more forceful disavowals. After all, why risk possibly taking back the House over one congresswoman’s Resistance grandstanding?
