[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 108 (Wednesday, June 21, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H3065-H3068]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. 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, before talking about the main event of 
three issues, it occurs to me it has been a while since we really have 
addressed what should be the end to the Ukraine-Russian war.
  In the past I have expressed frustration, and I still have this 
frustration as to why the Biden administration is not trying to work 
towards an end to the war? Eventually every war ends. The longer the 
war drags on, the worst it is for all involved.
  Ukraine has the second lowest birth rate in the world. It is a 
tragedy for any country to lose its young people, but particularly for 
a country that has so few young people in the first place. Likewise, 
Russia has a low birth rate, and they also have a high emigration rate, 
in which people are coming to this country. I ran into one in my 
district.
  Mr. Speaker, I know from spending time in the San Diego sector along 
the Mexican border, a lot of Russians have come across there. So you 
have two countries with a shortage of young people, and they are dying 
in a war. For humanitarian reasons we ought to end that war.

                              {time}  2130

  Furthermore, the war is very costly. Buildings are being damaged in 
Ukraine to a huge extent, and geopolitically, the Biden policy of 
letting this war drag on without sticking their nose in there at all 
for well over a year now drives China and Russia together.
  It wasn't that long ago that we had over 1,000 McDonald's in Russia. 
I recently toured a factory in my district. They owned a similar 
factory in Russia which they had to sell off. What I took from that, 
there was a time in the relatively recent past when the United States 
and Russia had very good relations, the United States and Ukraine had 
very good relations, and I don't know why we couldn't get back there if 
this war ended quickly. It seems when you talk to the Biden people they 
don't care if it goes on for years.
  Again, I make a plea to the Biden administration: See if you can look 
into doing what you can do to end that war.
  Now we will look at three issues that I think all have the potential 
to destroy the country, and I think we need some clear thinking on all 
three.
  First of all, let's look at the border. There has been a change in 
the way some people are entering the country. They are able to sign on 
to get entry to the United States, an app apparently, if they are 
coming in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It is because 
more people are coming in that way that it makes it more difficult to 
see how many people are coming in each month, and because it is now in 
two different places, we begin to lose track of the number of people 
coming into this country compared to where we were historically.
  Let's look at, for example, where we were in May. In the most recent 
May, 227,000 people came across the border as what we refer to as 
illegally; a year ago it was 166,000; 2 years ago it was 74,000; and 3 
years ago, under President Trump, it was 6,000. We have gone from 6,000 
a month crossing in May three years ago to 227,000 crossing in this 
past May.
  It is kind of a dramatic increase and something that should remain on 
the front page of our newspapers every day until this crisis abates.
  Mr. Speaker, it is the same thing if you look at April. Now that we 
have the other numbers, in April most recently 211,000 people crossing 
the border; a year ago 187,000; 2 years ago 66,000; and 3 years ago 
under 6,000.
  Again, we have gone from under 6,000 to 211,000. A dramatic increase 
in the number of people crossing the border. This is not a problem we 
can't deal with because we have to be bipartisan. It is always nice to 
be bipartisan, but this problem was solved 3 years ago, and now we have 
gone up by a factor of over 30.
  As we have an increasing number of people crossing the border, we 
also have more unaccompanied minors crossing the border. People ought 
to be especially concerned when people who are 13 or 14 years old are 
crossing the border without parents or even say an aunt or an uncle. 
Now we are having about 6,000 to 8,000 unaccompanied minors crossing 
every month. Under the prior administration it was 500 to 1,000. There 
are a lot more young people.
  There was a time when people on the other side of the aisle would be 
concerned about people crossing the border separately from their 
families. That was people who were separated for maybe 2 weeks because 
their parents had broken the law. Now we have 6,000 to 8,000 people 
every month being separated from their parents.
  Who knows if they will ever see them again?
  For minors, the lack of concern is stunning.
  Recently there was an article in The New York Times that I think the 
administration to a degree has disavowed, but no matter whose numbers 
you look at, Mr. Speaker, the administration has lost track of tens of 
thousands of minors. They don't know where they are after they gave 
them to people to take care of them. We have lost track of tens of 
thousands of kids.
  Particularly, we have a crisis in this country of human trafficking 
and sex trafficking that should be of particular concern to the 
administration. It should be of particular concern because people 
rarely come over here without the Mexican drug cartels signing off. We 
can only imagine that when these young kids work, sometimes third 
shifts in factories illegally, that they were sending money not only 
back home but to the drug cartels as well.
  I talked to the Acting Labor Secretary about what she should do if 
minors who are coming are found crossing illegally or if minors are 
found working illegally. She refused to say how often they contact the 
parents. Which, again, I thought was horrible. If you were an inspector 
of a factory, Mr. Speaker, and found 15-year-old immigrants working 
there who shouldn't, wouldn't the first thing you would do would be to 
contact the parents?
  Obviously.
  The Biden administration doesn't do that. The Secretary of Labor will 
not be drawn into even commenting that we ever contact the parents of 
young people who are found here. We should always try to unite children 
with their parents.
  Quite frankly, I even feel at the border if children come across with 
one parent that we should hold them up and look for the other parent. 
In the United States if parents are dealing with a divorce situation, 
in an effort to keep that family together, they sometimes try and say 
that one parent cannot move to another part of the country because we 
want both parents to participate in raising the children. I don't know 
why we don't do the same thing at our southern border.
  On the flip side of letting everyone in, we are also taking our eye 
off of criminals who are not kicked out. Without a lot of hoopla in the 
newspapers, the Biden administration in their budget guesses that for 
the next 2 years we can anticipate about 29,000 people being deported. 
I think they might have computed it in a different way, but in his 
final 2 years under Barack Obama, we deported about 460,000 people. In 
one 2-year period under Obama, 460,000 were deported. Under President 
Biden, we have only 29,000 who were deported in a 2-year period. It is 
just like saying that we absolutely don't care what is going on here.

  Of course, many deportations are caused by people here who are 
breaking

[[Page H3066]]

the law. People who are for open borders at least say: They are all 
such wonderful people. They are all so hardworking. What an asset to 
America.
  The Biden administration is doing a pretty pathetic job even compared 
to his predecessors, including President Obama. He is doing a bad job 
of deporting people who break the law.
  Of course, along with being soft on the border and letting everybody 
across, it inevitably means more people are bringing drugs across the 
border. In this country right now we have about 108,000 people every 
year dying of illegal drug overdoses. That is a crisis that America is 
not paying careful enough attention to.
  As I have pointed before, we have about 57,000 Americans who died in 
the Vietnam war over 12 years. I am old enough to remember the Vietnam 
war. There were articles all the time about American troops dying. 
People were protesting about how many Americans were dying, and 57,000 
people died in 12 years. It was a true tragedy.
  We now have 108,000 Americans dying every year from illegal drug 
overdoses in this country largely because illegal drugs are flying 
across the southern border. Virtually nothing is being done in this 
budget to tighten up the border. Nothing is being done to prevent more 
people from coming here. The inevitable result is a further change in 
America as the people who come here may not have the traditional 
American values that we need to keep our Republic going. Not to 
mention, we will have people coming here who are taking advantage of 
our generous welfare system and people coming who are breaking the law 
and are not going to be deported.
  That is the first issue that I feel that we really have to address.
  The second horrible policy concerns the bizarre demands of this new 
transgender lobby. This past week I had quite an experience. I met with 
an 18-year-old who had doctors prescribe from 12 years old on 
testosterone and puberty blockers. At age 15, the wonderful medical 
establishment in our United States of America--I think primarily from 
the psychiatry wing of the medical establishment--decided to remove her 
breasts at age 15.
  I don't care if someone went to medical school. Anybody with an ounce 
of common sense knows people change dramatically between when they are 
15, 20, 30, and 40 years of age. The idea that we have people going to 
medical school--I guess that is why they talk about people with book 
smarts and common sense. Nobody with common sense, unless they are 
absolutely obsessed with greed and just will do anything to make money 
in a surgery would possibly remove the breasts of a 15-year-old girl. 
They are doing it at two hospitals in Wisconsin which is horrible. This 
gal happened to have it done in California. Now this poor woman wants 
to undo the damage, and she can't.
  In Europe they are finding that puberty blockers may affect bones and 
brain health. Sweden found that 10 years after reassignment surgery the 
suicide rate was 20 times that of their peers.
  Is that even really a surprise?
  I could almost guess it on my own without reading the study.

                              {time}  2140

  That is what they are finding in Europe, which went down this path 
before this. In European countries, even their liberal, let's worship 
the doctor societies know that they made a mistake.
  I think someone has to look at the psychiatric industry and give them 
some more supervision because they are doing horrible things that 
anybody with any common sense would know.
  The other thing the Europeans found is something we should realize in 
this country, too. This is a much bigger problem than when I was a 
child, and nobody ever seemed to know about it. How is that possible? 
Well, it is possible because the more they talk about it in the press, 
the more they talk about it in the entertainment medium, the more self-
righteous politicians talk about it, the more young people begin to 
play in their mind with the idea that maybe if they are a boy, they 
should be a girl, and maybe if they are a girl, they should be a boy.
  This is what happened to the poor gal I met with. She was 10 or 11 
years old, 12 years old. She was unhappy. Given all that is out there 
on the internet, she thought, well, maybe I am unhappy because I should 
be a boy, which is perfectly understandable if you are inundated with 
this option on television and the computer constantly.
  This is what we have. We have a gender dysphoria crisis, and the 
crisis has been caused by all these doctors claiming it is a common 
thing. The more kids hear about other people going through it--they may 
read articles about it, as this gal did, or read about it on the 
internet. It sounds interesting. ``There are these experts saying I am 
unhappy because maybe I want to be a boy.'' That is what happens.
  I hope the press is a little bit more responsible in the future about 
pushing this as an everyday thing. When the press begins to push it, 
when it gets out there on computer screens, people begin to read it and 
begin to say maybe it is them.
  There are at least two Congressmen out there with great bills on 
this, one from Georgia and one from California. I hope we see these 
bills on the floor of the Congress here in the very near future.
  My one criticism of the bills is they only ban this type of risky 
surgery under age 18. I don't know why we don't try to knock that up a 
little bit higher.
  I know in this country, as a practical matter, we bar the sale of 
beer until age 21. I think this surgery seems a little bit crazy even 
for a 30-year-old.
  I hope we see these bills on the floor soon. I hope before they get 
to the floor, the authors make an adjustment to the bills and knock up 
the age to at least age 21.
  One other comment I learned reading about this situation and talking 
to someone who went through it is that part of the problem is we have 
these well-meaning, progressive people who egg on these people. They 
get on their Facebook page or whatever. They tell people who they don't 
even know how proud they are of them for doing these surgeries, how 
happy they should be now that they did these surgeries.
  By popular culture acting as cheerleaders for these surgeries, what 
do you think you get? A bunch of young, unhappy people who want to be 
happier.
  Every time someone sends you an email, sends you whatever comments, 
``You are so brave, and I am so happy for you,'' you are encouraging 
these people to get these horrific surgeries.
  A lot of the blame, I think, goes on the people who are not familiar 
with this, not familiar with the study showing a dramatic increase in 
suicides, not to mention people without any common sense. They egg 
these poor boys and girls on to get these surgeries.
  I beg people who consider encouraging these people or flattering 
these people for what they are doing to please stop it. Familiarize 
yourself with the information and stop to think that by flattering and 
encouraging these people, you may be the one responsible for making 
these life-changing decisions.
  I will wind up by saying I think we need more people looking at the 
qualifications of some of these psychiatrists who push this and why 
this whole profession has allowed this to careen out of control. I 
think we have to look at the role that profession is playing in our 
society.
  I will blame President Biden a little for this. His administration is 
all-in on this transgender, sexual confusion agenda, which is leading 
so many people to be unhappy.
  The fourth area that I would like to address tonight, I don't like to 
address it. I really don't like to address it because it is such an 
awkward area, but it has to be addressed because the President of the 
United States is obsessed with it, so I have to address it.
  The final issue is the issue of racism. It is Joe Biden's favorite 
issue, as far as I can tell. Joe Biden talked about racism four times 
in his inaugural speech and white supremacy once.
  He keeps bringing it up in his State of the Union speeches. Again 
this year, he inferred that policemen are racist, and we have to warn 
particularly little Black children about racist police.
  The studies don't show it. The studies show, adjusted for crimes 
committed, if anything, it is the other way around.
  Joe Biden, a White guy--I wonder what other people think of him--
keeps getting up there and saying how racist

[[Page H3067]]

we all are, that we have a racism problem with police. Like I said, the 
studies show that that is not true.
  What you can do, and I think people like Joe Biden have done, is 
intimidate the police into being afraid to act because they are in fear 
of being charged with racism. That is what you can do. You can make the 
police timid.
  Of course, ever since we had this massive antipolice feeling in the 
aftermath of the events in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, we have 
had a dramatic increase in the number of murders. I think a lot of 
these murders have to be blamed on the timidity of the police, which is 
caused by this strong antipolice feeling that you are getting out of 
Joe Biden and his allies and the mainstream media, which I think also 
creates this antipolice feeling and causes the police to feel that they 
have to back off for fear they will be called racists or whatever.

  Joe Biden again talked about white supremacy at Howard University, at 
their graduation. It was kind of a weird speech because I think 
normally in graduation speeches, you are dealing with the best and 
brightest in America. I know Howard has a very good reputation. You 
should have people leaving that stage with smiles on their faces, 
anxious to change the world and do wonderful things in the United 
States. Instead, we get President Biden showing up and saying what a 
racist society we have and creating, I think, a defeatist attitude for 
the people graduating there. I hope they got over Joe Biden's speech.
  Joe Biden's Secretary of Labor--designated; she hasn't been confirmed 
yet--believes the country was built on white supremacy. She will not 
back off that statement, despite me asking her a couple of times to do 
so. The Secretary of Labor, who has something to do with all sorts of 
laws in this country, apparently believes our country was built on 
white supremacy.
  The proposed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff feels we should be 
capping the number of White officers in the military at 42 percent. I 
mean, I would think he would be primarily concerned about getting the 
best people in there. It is important we have the best military in the 
world.
  Instead, we are going to have a bean counter who it sounds like is 
more concerned about where people's great-great-great-grandparents were 
born than what their qualifications are today.
  A study found, I mentioned before, in Joe Biden's first 2 years, of 
97 judges he appointed, only 5 were White men. Two of those were gay. 
This was in the aftermath of two Democratic Senators telling President 
Biden they were not going to confirm any more of his appointees if they 
were White men unless they were gay.
  To what degree are our judges being picked as the best, or to what 
degree are they being picked with Joe Biden feeling there is something 
wrong with appointing a White guy for the job?
  Those are kind of amazing numbers, aren't they? I am not a big fan of 
President Biden, and I would have guessed, if you would have asked me 
how many White men were in his first 97 judges, I would say, well, he 
is probably doing all he can to find people who aren't White guys, so 
it is only 25 or 30. Well, it is only five.

                              {time}  2150

  In his budget, he is asking that all of his agencies--Department of 
Defense, Department of the Interior, wherever--have new equity action 
teams. These pernicious new employees, I think, are going to run around 
and judge people solely by race or gender. Their goal is supposedly to 
look at diversity, which we will talk about in a second. Again, their 
goal is to follow down this path of all Americans are supposed to view 
themselves as a subgroup.
  He tried to discharge debt of only farmers of color until the courts 
shot him down there. He is trying to add a new preferred class. All 
these topics are recent topics. We ought to discuss this issue before 
it goes any further.
  Right now, there are a variety of classes when you fill out your 
Census form, when you fill out your EEO-1, which is a form that you 
have to fill out if you do business with the government. They break out 
if you are Asian, Pacific Islander, African American, Latin American, 
Native American.
  They want a new class--and I think with a class comes preferences--
for Middle Eastern and North African people. Again, I think we should 
have a public discussion here. I don't think Middle Eastern and North 
African people have been discriminated against or mistreated in 
America.
  I assume most of the people, if there are benefits from this program, 
will come to people who just came here or are coming in the future. I 
haven't seen a lot of articles on that, but there should be a public 
discussion.
  If somebody comes here from Syria, if somebody comes here from 
Algeria, should they get preferences in hiring? Should they get 
preferences if they found a business and are looking for a government 
contract? Should they get preferences if they want to get into medical 
school? That is what President Biden apparently wants, but I think we 
should have a public discussion on whether he gets away with it.
  As an aside, I am not sure how Joe Biden feels the country is such a 
white supremacist country. I don't believe you can really judge people 
that are worth their happiness by the amount of income, but it is a 
number that is easy to judge. If you look online, most of the 
successful groups in America today are not of European heritage. The 
most successful are from India. Most Indians that I know came here and 
are wildly successful, although they came here without even knowing 
English--people from Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Cuba.
  Thomas Sowell wrote a book 40 years ago--so it is a bit out of date, 
but I can't find any more recent information--in which he claims that 
people coming from the Caribbean, the children of people who come here 
from the Caribbean, make more money than the average American. I guess 
he would be talking about people from Jamaica.
  I suppose you would think of people, therefore, like Kamala Harris' 
dad, who came here from Jamaica and wound up being a professor at 
Stanford. He did very well. I don't think he had a huge amount of 
experience with racism, becoming a professor at Stanford. I would think 
most professors would love to have a job like that.
  Before we go that much further, I do think we should look at 
individual questions that should be answered. The first question is, 
right now, for the purpose of these government forms and who you hire, 
you kind of self-identify. We will pick Peru because I talked to 
someone from Peru the other day. If you came here directly from Peru, 
you are Peruvian and Latin American. If you have one of four 
grandchildren, they are also called Peruvian and are considered to 
bring a diverse attitude toward a job, or America supposedly should 
make up for past discrimination even though their ancestors may never 
even have been in America.
  Is it 25 percent? Is it 12\1/2\ percent? The Senator from 
Massachusetts had one of these DNA tests, and she found out she was 
like 1/64th Native American or less than 1/64th, but she apparently 
felt that was enough to put on her forms and apparently add diversity 
to the Harvard Law School faculty. I don't know if she really thought 
that, but I guess she allowed herself to be labeled as Native American 
based on whatever that would be, one great-great-great-grandparent.
  Is that the way we should go? Or should it be one out of eight? Like, 
if one of your eight great-grandparents is a certain type, is that 
enough to identify with that type? Now we have DNA tests, so we can 
look at these things.
  I know in my district, there was a rumor. People questioned whether 
one person who owned a construction company was really a person of 
color like he claimed he was. He could have been because he could say 
he was one-eighth, and under the current law, that would be enough to 
get preferences. I think we ought to have that discussion.
  The next question is, since affirmative action really began in the 
1960s, the idea was to make up, I think, for America's past sins, so 
should you have to have ancestors in America who can at least claim to 
have been hurt, or can you get what amounts to special preferences if 
you just immigrated to this country, say, a year ago?

  Right now, you don't even have to be a citizen. You can count on the 
government forms in which I think they view you more favorably if you 
have people from certain backgrounds, even if you were not in America 
for more than a couple of years. Should we require beneficiaries of 
these programs to be in America?

[[Page H3068]]

  Were your ancestors slaves in America, or can you be like Kamala 
Harris' dad and just have moved here from Jamaica, whether you had 
preferences or not? I don't know.
  The next issue that we should talk about is how long this should 
happen. We began to have affirmative action in the early 1960s. I think 
it really kicked into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. There was a 
lesser program under John Kennedy.
  We have had this program going for about 50 years. Obviously, they 
have added new groups that weren't included in the original number of 
groups. We have women in the mix now, too. How long should this program 
last with its government bureaucracy, with, in essence, government 
looking over people's shoulders, telling them who they have to hire for 
their company, that sort of thing? Another 10 years, another 100 years?
  Thomas Sowell has written about affirmative action, so that is 
another issue that we will have to look at. We will return and talk 
about other issues after this evening. Not the least of which I think 
we should talk about is how certain people think since you are supposed 
to be bringing diversity to the table.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________