For decades, she has railed against the system with no apparent self-awareness that she is the system: an insider, a poster child for entrenched incumbency. First elected to the California State Assembly in 1976 and to Congress in 1990, Rep. Maxine Waters is now in her 15th term, a committee chairwoman, and the longest-serving black female, and she routinely wins reelection by margins of 70% or more.
On Saturday evening in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, 1,800 miles from her South Los Angeles district, she fanned the flames of anger in a state reeling from riots.
“We’ve got to stay on the street, and we’ve got to get more. … You’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business,” Waters said.
Hours later, after 4 a.m., a Minnesota National Guard and police team were fired upon in a drive-by shooting. Two guard members suffered minor injuries from shattered glass.
That same night, as a local TV station absurdly headlined a story with “Maxine Waters urges Brooklyn Center protestors to get out and vote,” the congresswoman appeared to tamper with the unsequestered jury in the Derek Chauvin trial, which is poised to hear closing arguments on Monday.
Waters said Chauvin should be found “guilty, guilty, guilty, and if we don’t, we definitely cannot go away.” She was then asked, “And not just manslaughter, right?” And she responded, “Oh no, not manslaughter — for murder. I don’t know … whether it’s in the first degree, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s first-degree murder.”
On Sunday, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Democrats voted to expel from committee assignments and who faces an impending vote to be expelled from Congress, said she will be introducing a resolution to expel Waters for her “continual incitement of violence.” Hours later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did the same, tweeting, “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis — just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week.”
In a country as divided as the United States, such action is likely to solidify Waters’s base. In 1992, during the Los Angeles riots stemming from the acquittal of four officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King, she said: “There are those who would like for me and others on all of us to tell people to go inside to be peaceful, that they have to accept the verdict. I accept the responsibility of asking people not to endanger their lives. I am not asking people not to be angry. I am angry, and I have a right to that anger. And the people out there have a right to that anger. I don’t want to see anybody killed.”
When the rioting ended a few days later, 63 people were dead. There were over 2,000 injuries, 12,000 arrests, and over $1 billion in property damage, much of it in her district.
During the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, based on one charge of an “incitement of insurrection,” an angry tweet from Waters drew scrutiny, even from media allies.
Just last week, in a heated testimony over restoring liberties lost from coronavirus lockdowns, Waters again fired off a trademark barb at Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying, “You need to respect the chair and shut your mouth.”
Inherent in Waters’s philosophy is an apparent unawareness that the wrongs she seeks to correct occur too often in cities run by her own party and by politicians of her own race and carried out by police forces where minorities abound. Critics say she might better find the root cause of unrest and rioting by looking in the mirror.
