Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said on Sunday that President Trump and his supporters are all racist and are actively working to keep black people down.
Trump and his base “believe that it is their right and their responsibility to ensure that blacks and people of color and others do not rise to any level of influence and power, significant that would cause them not to be in total charge of the country,” Waters said on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”
The California Democrat did not mention the fact that the last U.S. president, Barack Obama, was black, and that he won easily in two elections.
Waters also said the U.S. “justice system is broken,” adding that for black people, “it has never really been in our favor, and it has basically been responsible for ensuring that we could never ever get beyond this suppression and this oppression that has been forced upon us for so many years.”
“So those who criticize Black Lives Matter, they can continue to do that, but I want to tell you the time has come now where we are joined by so many others who really were not there for us in the past.” Waters continued.
The 80-year-old career politician said that racism is the cause of most social problems in America.
“You saw it in all of the protests where you had whites and blacks and Asians and old and young, all saying something is wrong with this country. Something is wrong with our criminal justice system. Something is wrong with our policing,” Waters said. “It is racism.”
Waters also said that Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of Roger Stone shows there is a “need for Trump and those who support him to want to, you know, have absolute power.”
Waters, who started talking about impeaching President Trump even before he officially took office, also said over the weekend that Democrats plan to pursue him even after he leaves office.
“We’re committed to our mission,” Waters, the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview with National Public Radio. “We have the oversight responsibility as the Financial Services Committee in Congress, and we will not walk away from this. We will continue to do our work.”
“As I have said, we believe that there are issues involved, you know, related to money laundering … and some other kinds of things that certainly this president would have to answer to whether or not he’s still the president or not,” Waters said.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 against Trump in a case over whether the president could keep his tax records from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which had issued a subpoena to Trump’s accounting firm for his personal and business records, including his tax returns, dating back to 2011. Trump had sued to block the subpoenas and claimed that he had an “absolute immunity” as president.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, rejected that claim. “We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the president is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need,” Roberts wrote.
“Two hundred years ago, a great jurist of our Court established that no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding. We reaffirm that principle today and hold that the President is neither absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas seeking his private papers nor entitled to a heightened standard of need,” the chief justice wrote.
Trump noted on Twitter that “The Supreme Court sends the case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”