US Rep. Maxine Waters Has Activist Arrested Over Amnesty
It's only freedom of speech if you agree with them.
Homeless activist, Ted Hayes, was on Capitol Hill, like thousands of other citizens who make unscheduled visits to their congressional offices, and to other offices that don’t represent their congressional district. There is an open door policy on Capitol Hill and anyone who has been there or worked there knows it.
Ted, who founded and ran the homeless shelter in South Central L.A. called Dome Village was in Washington on June 19 to visit Hon. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick on the issue of immigration. In the elevator going to her floor he and his colleagues, Mr. James Spencer and Mr. Terrance Lang, began a conversation with some folks from Chicago who were going to see Maxine Waters in an unscheduled, meeting. Ted told them that James was from her district in Los Angeles and they would tag along and see if they could see her as well.
When they all arrived at the office, both groups were warmly welcomed by the staff. The Chicago group was ushered into Maxine’s personal office and Ted, James and Terrance waited patiently in the front room of the congressional office. They could hear laughter coming from her office and felt it was a sign that she was in a good mood and would receive their concerns about the amnesty bill.
Ted’s concern with the bill was that, as a black man who has worked with the homeless and disadvantaged for years, he saw an amnesty bill as one more obstacle for poor blacks to overcome. He saw the illegal aliens in his home area of Los Angeles putting an insurmountable burden on the social welfare and education system and saw jobs that would ordinarily go to his people . . . going to the illegals. When he speaks out about it, he is castigated as a racist, called names, slandered and threatened.
But this day, he was hopeful that since Maxine was seeing people half way across the nation, from a totally different district, that she would take the time to talk to one of her own constituents and their friends.
After the meeting ended though and the Chicago group left, buoyed by the personal, engaging encounter, they waited hopefully for her to emerge from her private office and give them an audience. She did emerge, but not to talk to them. She walked right past them which is hard to do in a ten by ten foot reception area with two grown men standing and one sitting. But she did, leaving the congressional office and heading for the hall.Ted got up to follow her asking why she was doing this . . . why wasn’t she going to talk to them? To this query she spun around and responded, “You are full of sh-t”, “You are full of sh-t, Ted Hayes.” I forgot to mention that she knows Ted and has known him for 23 years. For those of you who don’t know Ted, he can be imposing in his appearance, standing 6’7”, dressed in long robs, dreadlocks, skullcap and sandals. It would be easy for the guards, who heard the ruckus, to assume that he was a foreign assailant and a threat to the congresswoman.
(Ted) then suggested that if she turned her back on her black constituents . . .the way she just did to them and voted for the amnesty bill, that she would be through in congress. She would be finished. The female guard took this as a terrorist threat and handcuffed him. Congresswoman Maxine Waters did nothing to prevent this, show a semblance of leadership or come to the aid of a good man that she has known for 23 years.
She could have said, “It’s ok officer, Ted is a constituent and from the LA area. He and I disagree on a lot of issues, but believe me, he is not a terrorist. He is just passionate, as I am, about certain issues.” Did she do this? Did she care about this man she has known, being handcuffed in the halls of congress, escorted out the front doors of the Rayburn House Office Building, jailed and charged with disorderly conduct? No, but what she did care about was whether or not he would talk to the press. Her office called and expressed her concern that this story of his arrest not be leaked to the press and not get back to her district.
He said he would honor that request because he wanted to do the right thing and did not want to hurt her in any way. He was just trying to have a conversation about illegal immigration and how it was hurting blacks and was confused as to why she was turning her back on her people, and was more sympathetic with people not only not from her district . . . but also not from her country.
