House speaker Paul Ryan castigated Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) during a Tuesday news conference, calling on her to apologize for recent comments advocating the public harassment of Trump administration officials.
“There is no place for this,” Ryan said. “She obviously should apologize. When we, in this democracy, are suggesting that because we disagree with people on political views, on policy views, on philosophical views, that we should resort to violence and harassment and intimidation, that’s dangerous for our society, dangerous for our democracy, and she should apologize and there’s just no place for that in our public discourse.”
Over the weekend, Waters seemed to endorse the recent targeting of administration officials for harassment and protests.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that 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. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters told the attendees at a rally in Los Angeles Saturday.
The California lawmaker doubled down on her remarks later the same day, during an afternoon appearance on MSNBC. “The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you,’” she said.
The comments came four days after Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was forced to leave a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C. by a crowd of socialist protesters, and one day after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service by the owner of a Virginia restaurant due to her work for the administration.
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