Yes, congressional Democrats should strip radical Rep. Maxine Waters of California from her committee assignments, but that should be only the beginning of their penance regarding issues related to police.
It is entirely their fault that Congress hasn’t passed bipartisan police reform. It is their fault that radicals can still stir up riots by saying nobody is listening to their pleas for reform and that the only recourse is mayhem.
Let’s start with Waters. My colleague, Zachary Faria, makes a good case that her fellow Democrats should strip her from committee assignments just as they did to radical Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in February. Waters has a well-established record of inciting protesters to be abusive rather than peaceful. She again indulged that dangerous habit last weekend by appearing at the sometimes violent street protests near Minneapolis to urge that protesters break the law by ignoring curfews while telling protesters to be even “more confrontational” than they already are.
This sort of incendiary rhetoric merits major discipline against Waters, who chairs the important House Financial Services Committee. Especially from such senior members of the House, such behavior is unacceptable. Waters has been in Congress for 30 years, so she certainly knows what the standards should be.
Waters, though, is hardly the only problem. In the same set of remarks in which she repeatedly used inciteful language, she said this when asked about police reform efforts locally and in Congress: “Well, I am not happy that we have talked about police reform for so long … We’ve been fighting for so many years for reform, reform, reform.” And she blamed “the right wing, the racists,” for being “opposed to it.”
Actually, conservatives are more than willing to adopt many of the ideas leading police reformers have pushed for years. There was near-universal Republican support last year for a thoughtful reform bill pushed by (black) Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. The bill would have withheld funds from local law enforcement agencies that do not bar chokeholds (a specific goal mentioned by Waters in her comments), discouraged the use of no-knock warrants, collected data on the use of force by police, and put more body cameras on the streets, among numerous other measures both parties agree on. Scott even said he would not object to holding votes on as many amendments to the bill as Democrats wanted to offer and said he himself would support some of them.
As Sen. Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses and usually votes with the Democrats, said at the time, “Voting against [Scott’s bill] will end the discussion of this subject in the Senate for the foreseeable future, and leave us with nothing to show for all the energy and passion that has brought this issue to the forefront of public consciousness.”
But Democrats, unwilling to give a Republican (especially a black one) credit for authoring police reforms, killed the bill via a Senate filibuster, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outrageously said Scott’s bill was somehow “trying to get away with murder, actually. The murder of George Floyd.”
Now that’s incendiary.
Every member of Congress should be saying that the system of justice is working well through a transparently fair trial of the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck. They should be insisting, demanding, that all protesters remain lawful at all times, while reminding people that police reforms are already being adopted in local jurisdictions across the country. They should all agree that the police are necessary and that most of them do their jobs very, very well.
But congressional Democrats seem to prefer riots to reason. It is they who are thwarting justice.
