OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
President Joe Biden turned some heads again on Thursday while delivering remarks at an event in Los Angeles.
At one point, Biden said he agreed with everything controversial California Democrat Maxine Waters says. “Rep. Maxine Waters — whatever Maxine says, I agree with,” the president declared.
Biden: “Maxine Waters! Whatever Maxine says, I agree with.” pic.twitter.com/Hi3INrtWhg
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 13, 2022
As noted by the New York Post, it was not clear if Biden was sincere or if he was merely making an attempt at dry humor in praising “the notoriously hot-headed lawmaker.” However, that said, Biden has praised her before.
At a June 2021 event, Biden urged Waters to run for the U.S. Senate. “Senator, I hope. You think I’m kidding, I’m not,” Biden said when he shook Waters’ hand.
For her part, Waters has made several controversial statements in recent years. In June, she urged Americans to “defy” the U.S. Supreme Court after justices overturned the Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 and sent the issue back to the states.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Women are going to control their bodies, no matter how they try and stop us,” Waters said. “The hell with the Supreme Court, we will defy them. Women will be in control of their bodies!”
Maxine Waters and Al Green among members of Congress who’ve shown up outside the Supreme Court to denounce the end of Roe. “Women are going to control their bodies, no matter how they try and stop us,” Waters says. “The hell with the Supreme Court, we will defy them.” pic.twitter.com/SCkicoQj68
— Alejandro Alvarez (@aletweetsnews) June 24, 2022
“And if they think black women are intimidated or oppressed, they’ve got another thought coming. Black women will be out in droves. We will be out by the thousands. We will be out by the millions,” she added. “We’re going to make sure we fight for the right to control our own bodies.”
In September 2021, she helped spread the ultimately false narrative that mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents “whipped” Haitian migrants with their reins, comparing the alleged incident to slavery.
“We’re saying to the president and everybody else, you’ve got to stop this madness. And I want to know, in the first place, who’s paying these cowboys to do this work?” she said. “They have got to be gotten rid of. They’ve got to be stopped. It cannot go on. What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery.”
"I’m unhappy, and I'm not just unhappy with the cowboys who were running down Haitians and using their reins to whip them. I'm unhappy with this administration," Rep. Maxine Waters says at a news conference on the situation at the U.S. southern border. https://t.co/tUeqoESHTP pic.twitter.com/BuWTMs8ilf
— ABC News (@ABC) September 22, 2021
In April 2021, she traveled to Minneapolis, Minn., ahead of a jury’s verdict in the case of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was eventually convicted of murdering George Floyd. “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business,” she said during a pre-verdict protest.
In 2018 during a campaign event in California, Waters infamously called on Americans to confront members of then-President Donald Trump’s administration in public, with critics suggesting that she called for violence against them.
“And if you see anybody from [Trump’s] 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,” she told a crowd.
Waters has also been scrutinized for family patronage after critics learned she paid her daughter over $1.2 million in total over the last decade, though it was legal to do so.
“The reelection campaign of Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., shelled out another $16,500 to her daughter in June, adding to the more than $1.2 million the congresswoman has paid her daughter over the past nearly two decades. Karen Waters, who has been organizing slate-mailing operations to bolster her mother’s re-election since 2003, and her company, Progressive Connections, have received more than $1.2 million from Waters’ campaign,” Fox Business reported in June.
That led Republicans to call for a ban on such familial patronage in September. GOP members introduced The Family Integrity to Reform Elections (FIRE) Act, which would bar any candidate running for federal office from compensating immediate family members for campaign services.
