[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 103 (Tuesday, June 13, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2877-H2879]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Duarte). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we go home every weekend. In June, when we 
go home to Wisconsin, what do we think of? What is going on in June? 
June is Dairy Month in Wisconsin. It is Dairy Month around the whole 
country.
  Of course, last weekend, I spent Dairy Month at Breakfast on the Farm 
in Winnebago County and Breakfast on the Farm in Manitowoc County, 
having milk and all sorts of different cheeses.
  Whether you like Colby or provolone, cheddar or mozzarella, whether 
you like your milk pasteurized or raw, whole or 2 percent, whether you 
like cream cheese or just plain cream, Wisconsin is America's 
Dairyland, and everybody has to remember, June is Dairy Month.
  Now, on to our next topic. I have just been reading about a KGB 
defector. What he wrote should be required reading for all Congressmen 
and all young children. His name, he has since died, is Yuri Bezmenov. 
He was a Soviet defector in the 1980s.
  When he defected--he defected to China--he gave an interview about 
the KGB. He said things that I think are far different than what the 
average American thinks about the KGB.
  He pointed out that about 85 percent of the KGB employees were not 
spies. They were not going around looking for nuclear secrets or 
finding out more about our military. They were wide out in the open. 
They were engaging in psychological warfare, subversion to destroy the 
American psyche.
  He pointed out that what they do is out in the open, if only the 
press would pay attention. Well, you can see he was a newcomer to 
America, as he thought the press might pay attention.
  He pointed out that, at the time, people might think we were at 
peace, but in fact, we were at war. It was a war, psychological 
warfare.
  Nikita Khrushchev said the same thing. He felt we would destroy 
America from within. It would not be a military attack that would 
destroy America. It would be America losing confidence in itself.
  There are a variety of ways in which the United States is, in my 
mind, in danger. Last week, we talked about the huge deficit, and 
President Biden, through a variety of bills last year, certainly put 
the value of the dollar at risk.
  You can say we are in danger because we are losing the value of the 
family. Of course, John Adams said that our Constitution is built for a 
moral and religious people, totally unfit for any other kind.
  We have a situation here in which a group called Black Lives Matter, 
which had a lot to do with the Democrats maintaining their majority in 
2020, Black Lives Matter was opposed to the traditional nuclear family. 
Of course, they have a lot of allies here in Congress who presumably 
didn't object to that.
  That is another way we could tear down America, through our growing 
welfare state, having more and more people without the psychological 
background of a family.
  We certainly have a problem at the southern border. No normal country 
could survive unlimited immigration. We see two things going on down 
there. We see over 200,000 people a month streaming across the border, 
and we also see, compared to past administrations, even people who 
break the law are not deported.

                              {time}  2110

  You could say that is another way we are being destroyed from within. 
It is not a military attack, but it is over 200,000 people who have not 
been trained how to become Americans, who have not had drilled into 
them the freedoms that we should respect and that we are a great 
country because our great Constitution is supposed to have a limited 
government, guarantee us a limited government, and we are supposed to 
be self-reliant. That is certainly a problem.
  We have the bizarre transgender movement. I ran into a gal the other 
day who had literal surgery taking away some of her organs at 15 years 
old and puberty blockers. That is another way to completely try to 
blend the difference of the sexes, which would be another way to 
destroy society.
  What I am going to focus on tonight is the Biden obsession with 
racism. I think if there is one issue that Joe Biden seems most 
obsessed over, it is this idea that supposedly in the United States we 
are a racist country. He brought it up four times in his inaugural 
speech and talked about white privilege once. This year, in his State 
of the Union speech, again Joe Biden talked about the racist police and 
if you are a person of color, you have to tell your children to watch 
out for the racist police. Obviously, this is an important message from 
Joe Biden.
  He has certainly acted on it, as well. Right now, his Department of 
Labor nominee--she may make it; she may not--claimed in the past that 
we are a society built on white privilege, kind of this bizarre hatred 
of White people that I thought was merely in academia, but Joe Biden 
decided to try to appoint someone head of the Department of Labor who 
felt that way. I sure hope the Senate rejects her.
  He is trying to appoint General Charles Q. Brown to be head of the 
Joint Chiefs. He right off the bat said we have too many White 
officers. He wants to restrict the number of White officers in the 
military to 43 percent. In other words, he doesn't want qualified White 
people becoming officers, because he has got some psychological problem 
there. I think we have to pay attention to that sort of thing when it 
comes to the Biden administration.
  This is not limited to President Biden. Not long after he took 
office, both Senator Duckworth of Illinois and Senator Hirono of Hawaii 
threatened Joe Biden saying they did not want any more White men, that 
they were not going to vote to confirm any more White men in his 
administration. He met with them. They backed off that to a degree. I 
should say, he shouldn't appoint White men unless they are gay, which 
gets back to this kind of obsession with breaking away with the 
traditional family that we sadly have among the Democratic Party right 
now.
  In addition to that, President Biden wants in his budget to have new 
equity action teams in all of our government agencies: the Department 
of the Interior, the Department of Justice. These equity action teams 
presumably will enforce the type of things that Senators Duckworth and 
Hirono want. They want to look at people's race before anybody gets 
hired. They want to look at somebody's race before they get a 
government grant. I think it is something that the American public is 
not discussing anywhere nearly as much as they should.
  It is kind of particularly ridiculous, because, of course, you are 
never probably going to have a country in which more immigrants, who 
have different ethnicity than the native born, have succeeded so much 
and are so accepted. If you look around, the most successful ethnic 
group in America today are Indian Americans. You look at other wildly 
successful groups: Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cuban. Thomas 
Sowell wrote 40 years ago--I can't vouch whether it is today or not--
but

[[Page H2878]]

by the second generation, immigrants from the Caribbean of African 
descent outperform the average American.
  At a time when the overwhelming evidence is that racism has very 
little role in America, Joe Biden is trying to elevate the potentially 
hard feelings by doing all he can by not treating people equally and 
looking at people racially.
  Now, I think we should have a discussion over this, and the 
discussion does not necessarily have to be in Congress, but it should 
be here, as well. I think the discussion should be in periodicals, 
online, as people debate what the answers to various questions are.
  First of all, how long should this go on? Affirmative action--in 
other words, preferences based on race or based on sex, as well as 
preferences for women--have been going on since 1965. We have been 
going on with this thing 58 years. I have a feeling when Lyndon Johnson 
really kicked it off in earnest--there was a more mild policy under 
President Kennedy--when it was kicked off by President Johnson, I don't 
think even he would have dreamed that this would have been going on for 
57 years. The question is, should there be a time when it ends.
  When we give people preferences or identify people by their ethnic 
group, what defines somebody's ethnic group? Right now, we identify or 
put on the government forms African American, Latin American, Asian 
Pacific Islander, Native American. What makes up a person in these 
groups?
  Right now you self-identify. In the extreme case of Elizabeth Warren, 
who was something like a 64th or a 128th Native American, she felt that 
was enough that she should be a Native American. I think she is 
relatively rare. I don't think a lot of Americans would do that, but 
apparently it is legal. It was a way for her to become a professor at 
Harvard Law School. But what should be the cutoff? A half a percent? A 
quarter a percent? One-eighth?
  On the face of it, it seems a little bit strange, because a lot of 
these people you would never even guess what ethnicity they are, but 
that is the way the system works nowadays. We do have DNA tests 
nowadays. I think we should put some sort of standards as to who gets 
preferences.
  Then where you come from. Right now, if you are somebody whose 
ancestry was in Spain and you come to the United States, you are 
considered a European, but if your ancestry is Spain and your ancestors 
spent three generations in Cuba, you are considered an ethnic minority. 
To me, that seems a little bit silly. I am not sure what the difference 
is.

  Maybe the person from Spain just came here right now and the person 
from Cuba, one-quarter Cuban, came here 50 years ago. Does this make 
any sense that when you fill out the forms or see who is going to get 
the government contract or who is going to get into Harvard Law School, 
that the person from Cuba is treated different than the person from 
Spain? If we have someone from Italy or somebody who was of Italian 
descent but spent three generations in Argentina, should that person be 
given preference? I think that is something we should have a public 
discussion over.
  Should you have to be from America? Right now, the way these programs 
work, if you show up, if you are not even a citizen, you can get 
preferences on the form.
  You have an example right now, the Vice President's own dad who came 
here from Jamaica. Originally, at the time this affirmative action 
kicked in, I thought it was a little bit to make up for slavery or make 
up for Jim Crow. Well, somebody like the Vice President's dad, he 
wasn't mistreated in America. He wasn't in America at all. He came here 
for the land of opportunity, came here to become a professor at 
Stanford University. Is that fair?
  When we try to identify different groups as somebody who really never 
suffered in the United States at all, because they are a recent 
immigrant, should they be getting these preferences? I think that is 
something that should be talked about. I don't know.
  Should there be a wealth component? We are supposedly helping the 
underserved communities, but the way the programs work today and the 
different areas that they pick out--I think it is government 
employment, employment in businesses that do business with the 
government, government contractors, if you have a business, and 
admissions to universities.

                              {time}  2120

  Should there be a wealth component? If I am the son of a multi-
multimillionaire who is a member of a favored group, do I get 
preferences?
  It kind of seems wrong to say I am an underserved group, but that is 
the way it works today, which is typical, and we will come back in a 
second to what Thomas Sowell says about affirmative action.
  He wrote a book on the topic. Usually it benefits the well-off 
people, as things that come up from the progressive background usually 
do.
  Should there be some familiarity with your background? I mean, if I 
am going to claim to get preferences because my ancestors came from 
Peru, should I have to know something about Peru?
  Somebody that doesn't even know Spanish, has spent generations here, 
never lived in a Spanish country, should I get preferences there? 
Should that have something to do with this?
  Are there jobs that should be exempt from preferences where it is 
entirely based on merit? One of the things that is going on in America 
today is a lot of medical schools are saying you don't have to take the 
MCAT test.
  Now, when I was younger, we usually associated doctors with the ones 
that did the best on the test because if you were going to be a doctor, 
it was a matter of life and death. We wanted to take the smartest 
person no matter what.
  Now we have medical schools saying we don't want to look at any test 
to determine your intelligence. We want to base your admission on 
things like what you say on an essay or how many groups you volunteered 
for, that sort of thing.
  I think we should have that discussion. Maybe we should have 
preferences for certain jobs like college professor where you can say 
it is not a matter of life and death if we have somebody who is not as 
good, but we should make sure we always get the better people for the 
medical field or for dentistry or for airline pilots or air traffic 
controllers.
  Should we say, well, we can afford to have people that aren't good 
air traffic controllers because what is the worst thing that could 
happen?
  I think that is another question that we should be asking right now 
because the Biden administration is clearly walking down this path.
  That is why they have these what we are referring to as equity action 
teams. We want to know exactly what standards the equity action teams 
are using.
  I had a fellow come up to me a few years ago whose son worked in one 
of our Federal agencies, and he loved the job. He went to college for 
the job.
  He was told after 9 or 10 years why he was not being promoted. He was 
told, you are a White guy who is not a veteran. We give preferences to 
veterans too.
  Is that fair? If they are going to continue down that path, shouldn't 
we at least make it public so this guy wouldn't have gone to school to 
learn about a field that he wanted to excel in, only to be told 10 
years later that he is a White guy, he is not a veteran, too bad? I 
think that is something that ought to be discussed before we hurt any 
other people.
  In any event, I think this is a topic to look at. I think it is 
certainly one way to cause hard feelings in America.
  I have talked about Thomas Sowell who wrote a book dealing with 
affirmative action about 40 years ago now. He pointed out that other 
countries that went down this path--America's not all the way down the 
path--but have the same experiences as America.
  First of all, it begins, and it is supposed to be temporary; 57 years 
later, it is still here. It is supposed to be restricted to maybe one 
or two ethnic groups, but here in America, first people of African 
decent, and then people who never were mistreated in the United States 
come here and are automatically given preferences based on where their 
ancestors were born centuries ago.
  We begin to add other groups. I make another point about why this is 
relevant, because Joe Biden is also trying to add another preference 
group.
  He wants to add Middle Eastern and North African people. Right now, I 
rattled off all the different backgrounds

[[Page H2879]]

that we are supposed to be keeping track of, but we don't keep track of 
people from Algeria or Syria or Iraq, and Joe Biden wants to do that, 
as well.
  I think we should have a discussion there. There are not a lot of 
people in this country with backgrounds from those countries, but there 
are more and more people coming here.
  Joe Biden apparently says that if you are from America, and you apply 
for a job, and we have an immigrant from Algeria or an immigrant from 
Iraq, people like that should be given preferences.
  Well, I think maybe that is something we should talk about here a 
little bit and see what the appropriate course of action is.
  Whatever the course of action is, it should be after a thorough 
public discussion, not just something, you know, pushed in under the 
table because it is a sensitive topic.
  In any event, I would ask the press to look into this situation. We 
want to find out what rules President Biden's equity action teams are 
operating under.
  We want to have a public discussion. Is it right to add North African 
and Middle Easterners to this topic?
  Should we give preferences to people who have no background of 
discrimination in America, people who just show up and immediately get 
preferences?
  I obviously have my strong opinions, but I would like to hear what 
the pundit class, that so many of us read, has to say.
  I would like to see maybe sometime the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce or the Judiciary Committee look into this and see what the 
different viewpoints are because it affects a lot of Americans. We are 
kind of moving down this train without having a public discussion.
  Those are my comments on that topic. I think it is a topic more 
people ought to look into. I think they ought to review how some people 
want to destroy America from within.

  I think they ought to review what happened in other countries as they 
went down the affirmative action path, be it Nigeria, be it Sri Lanka, 
be it Malaysia or Singapore, and I think a lot of times it doesn't work 
out very well.
  It is something we ought to have a discussion about, and nobody else 
is talking about it around here, so we throw that open for discussion.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________