Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., no stranger to provocative rhetoric, stirred the pot again on Sunday, accusing the tea party of harboring a “mean spirit” in a video posted on Youtube.
Speaking at a church service, Rep. Waters denounced the arrival of the tea party on Capitol Hill, exclaiming, “I don’t know what party they’ve been to — that must have been some bitter tea.”
She continued, “They came with a mean spirit, and now they want to cut the food stamps. They don’t want to fund education. They want to give all of the tax breaks to the richest people.”
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In her address to the congregation, Waters offered a defense of President Barack Obama’s health care reforms, explaining, “We had fashioned a way that, working with government, we could afford to have everybody have insurance no matter what level you are — that those people with no money whatsoever, no income, Medicaid. For our elders, Medicare. […] Well, all of that is being jeopardized. ”
It is unclear whether her remarks referred to entitlement program reforms proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI.
Waters also indicted her critics’ motives, explaining, “When those people are messing with me in Washington, D.C., and they come after me because I’m trying to help poor people and people of color, I say ‘They ain’t seen nothing yet.’”
Rep. Waters previously roused the ire of conservative activists in August of last year, when she told a gathering in Inglewood, Calif. that the tea party “can go straight to hell.”
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