[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 116 (Thursday, July 14, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H6618-H6619]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  BEING A MORAL AND RELIGIOUS COUNTRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, first of all, just so you all know, you 
don't have to worry about waiting 30 minutes. It is not going to be 
that long.
  I would like to talk about some issues tonight that I don't feel have 
been adequately addressed in this forum. The press--not the people back 
home, but the press--keeps trying to make a big deal out of January 6.
  When I go home, as I am sure for all of my colleagues who go home, 80 
percent of the comments deal with inflation, insofar as other things 
are being dealt with. It is not January 6.
  Nevertheless, there is something that bothers me. Since we are 
apparently going to have these hearings on January 6, everything ought 
to be able to come out. If I was on that committee, the first thing I 
would ask is for all the video from the Capitol that day to be 
released.
  It seems to me if people genuinely want to know what is going on, 
that is where I would start. Therefore, on last October 5, myself, 
Congressman Norman, and Congressman Gohmert asked for all the video 
from the Capitol to be released that day. It doesn't seem that much of 
a difficult request. There were many people still being held in jail, 
and the press kept trying to rile up the population and let them 
believe something horrible had happened.
  I received inquiries from both Republican and Democrat constituents 
who felt it would be a good idea if we released the video of what was 
going on that day. It would be helpful if Congresswoman Liz Cheney or 
Adam Kinzinger also weighed in, saying all that video should be 
released. But for whatever reason, it hasn't been released.
  One more time, Congressmen Norman, Gohmert, and myself have had to 
make a request of the Justice Department to release these videos. It is 
getting to the point where no longer is it just an innocent inquiry 
because a few people asked for it. People are beginning to think that 
the Justice Department must be hiding something.
  One more time, we make the request. The request should be made by the 
Capitol press corps. There was a time when press in this country, one 
of their goals was to get behind the curtain in front of government and 
expose what was really going on, and both conservative and liberal 
journalists would have quickly asked for these videos. For whatever 
reason, they haven't asked for them.
  I, again, ask the Department of Justice to release them. But above 
all, because I don't think the Justice Department apparently cares what 
Congressmen Norman, Gohmert, or Grothman say, the press in this country 
that seems obsessed with January 6 ought to demand that the Justice 
Department release these videos. After all, it has been 16 months, 17 
months, after this took place. It has been 18 months after this took 
place. It is high time we found out what was going on there.
  Every day that goes forward in which the video is not released, I 
think the American public, the small amount that is paying attention, 
is going to be more convinced that somebody is hiding something.
  Now, I don't want to accuse anybody of anything. I don't want to be a 
conspiracy theorist, but my constituents are wondering, when I write 
that letter, why we are sitting on the video. If it is so important to 
find out what really went on that day, please, Department of Justice, 
release the hidden videos and, please, comatose American press corps, 
ask that the videos be released.
  I have spoken from this microphone many times this biennium about a 
tilt toward the totalitarian sort of government that we see going on. 
And by totalitarian, I mean the worst type of totalitarian, a Marxist 
totalitarian government.
  We see a variety of danger signs on the horizon. We began this 
session with people being sworn in who, in order to get elected, got 
help from Black Lives Matter, a group whose founders made no bones 
about the fact that they were Marxist and made no bones about the fact 
that they were against the traditional American family, what they 
described as the Western nuclear family.
  We have then seen online media giants suppress free speech. Now, I 
suppose you could say they are private companies, and I suppose you 
could say it is their right to suppress free speech or prevent you from 
googling something, from getting a cross section of views that are out 
there.
  Nevertheless, we know, as a practical matter, they have almost a 
monopoly in this country, and it is concerning that these companies 
that have, as a practical matter, monopolies have decided to suppress 
certain speech. They certainly have the heart of a totalitarian 
atheist.
  The next thing we look at is a growing percentage of the gross 
national product no longer being spent by the people who earn the money 
but being spent by the government, by the politicians in Washington. 
That is another danger sign.

[[Page H6619]]

  We see a President openly talking about taking away the freedom to 
defend yourself. He wants the only guns to be owned by government 
employees. He didn't want the right of defense to rest with the 
individual. This would be another trait of a government very different 
from that which our forefathers anticipated.
  We saw an effort made to have our government deny visas or deny 
property to foreigners if they engaged in suppression of human rights. 
But the human rights that we know the Biden administration meant were 
not fear of murder or robbery or something. The human rights were aimed 
at the field of pro-life, so that politicians or other people abroad 
who fought for pro-life issues, or issues with regard to so-called gay 
rights, if you weren't on the right side, the Biden administration 
wanted to threaten foreign officials with taking away the right for a 
visa in this country, taking away their right to travel, as well as 
taking away their property in this country.

  Does that sound like kind of a dangerous thing?
  America had better wake up. We are going the wrong way. John Adams 
said our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people and is 
totally unfit for any other kind.
  When you listen to the things that have been going on in this 
country, what do you think? Aren't we headed for a very different 
country than the moral and religious country that is required to keep 
our country going?
  There are other things that kind of just amaze me. June is Dairy 
Month. Being from Wisconsin, everybody in Wisconsin knows June is Dairy 
Month. But for some people around Washington, they don't think 
primarily of Dairy Month. They call it Pride Month, and the U.S. flies 
the gay flag, and the Vatican, as well as many other countries around 
the world.
  Do you think our forefathers would have anticipated, particularly 
given all the blessings that our country has been given, that we would 
decide to fly our flag with, in essence, a sexual preference flag all 
around the world? Again, highly questionable.
  Then, we have another step in a very unusual direction for a country 
that was supposed to be a moral and religious country. We are sending 
out requests for grants from nonprofits around the world to promote 
humanism and atheism. Isn't that kind of unusual?
  Here we are, such a blessed country. What do we do with our money? 
Why, we say, does anybody around the world want to promote atheism?
  As recently as the 1960s in this country, only 2 percent of the 
people said they did not believe in God, only 2 percent in the 1960s. 
Look how far down we have gone. Now, we elect a government and are 
asking for grants to be given to organizations to promote atheism in 
our name.
  I mean, when you look at the State Department, I guess the two things 
that they will tell people abroad are, if you want to be like the 
United States, if you want to follow in its footsteps, follow the pride 
flag and follow atheism. Very, very disappointing. I think it is time 
that the clergy and the people of America wake up.
  I know we are just supposed to talk about inflation. Of course, 
inflation is bad, and, of course, this bad inflation was caused by 
excessive government spending. That is all true. But there are other 
issues that are going on out there as well, and I am very afraid, given 
how quickly we have gone downhill the last 40 or 20 or 10 years, where 
we are going to wind up in another 10 or 20 or 30 years if this sort of 
activity continues to come from our government in Washington.
  While we took our 2-week break, we hit 100 murders a year in the city 
of Milwaukee. If that happens in the second half of the year, we are 
going to wind up hitting the all-time-record number of murders in 
Milwaukee, a city that is directly adjacent to my district.
  We have to ask ourselves, what can we do to reduce the number of 
murders? Part of it, I have always felt, is the decline in the 
traditional family. We have spoken, again, from this microphone about 
the degree to which our welfare programs seem conditioned upon either 
not working or, above all, make sure if you have children, you don't 
have them in wedlock because if you have a two-earner household, it is 
very difficult to take advantage of all these grants.

                              {time}  2015

  Mr. Speaker, this is where some of it comes from, but some of it also 
comes from kind of the neutering of the police corps by having 
irresponsible politicians calling the police, in general, racists.
  When you call all the police racists, which I don't think they are, 
you create a chilling influence. Police, particularly in big cities 
with high crime rates, where it may be more important they engage the 
citizenry than anywhere else, the police back off. When they back off, 
you have something that is almost unbelievable to see: a hundred 
murders in the first half of the year in the city of Milwaukee.
  By the way, I was born in the city of Milwaukee, and as recently as 
the early 1970s, Milwaukee had the lowest murder rate of the 20 biggest 
cities in the country.
  Milwaukee was always proud of how safe it was, and now we are kind of 
going the opposite way quickly. At least I believe one of the reasons 
is certain politicians. It has become politically expedient for them to 
trash the police departments, to, therefore, threaten individual police 
with lawsuits, resulting in police not engaging the population enough 
and resulting in a high number of murders.
  I, therefore, call upon all of our politicians to boldly speak out in 
favor of the police and boldly describe to the population as a whole 
that we do not have a racist country, which is something else that 
should be pointed out.
  In my own district, I talk to the Hmong, who came here not even 
knowing the language. If you talk to the Hmong, all of their children 
and their grandchildren are doing fantastically well, living the 
American Dream.
  I know an increasing number of people from India in my district, 
another example of a group that frequently came to America, didn't know 
the native language, and now they are living the American Dream.
  But for some reason--I personally believe they are trying to destroy 
America--politicians are out there talking about what a horrible, 
racist country they have.
  I think they do it to divide America and weaken America, but I beg 
them to stop doing it that way and to win elections based on issues, 
not on name-calling and not on teaching our young people that we have a 
horrible, racist country.
  Mr. Speaker, I guess for the benefit of all the people listening 
tonight, I yield back the balance of my time.

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