[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 129 (Wednesday, July 26, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H4022-H4025]
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, we have a few issues that ought to be 
debated on the floor and brought to the attention of the news media to 
help them with articles that would educate the American public a little 
bit on issues of importance.
  I haven't spoken on Ukraine lately, but I will point out that 
Congress has not received a briefing on what is going on in Ukraine 
since December. That is way too long to go on the first significant 
land war in Europe in over 70 years. I ask the Biden administration to 
send its officials over to allow Members of Congress to at least get 
their opinion as far as what is going on.
  As I have said before, this war should not be that difficult to end. 
Ukraine has the second lowest birthrate in the world. The Ukrainians, 
who have such a shortage of young people, should be especially ready to 
end this war. The Russians also have a low birthrate, and even prior to 
the war a lot of young Russians were emigrating.
  Over 2 years ago, before the war started, I was in San Diego, and in 
the San Diego sector the Border Patrol and the immigration folks told 
me during the prior 2 weeks or month or whatever, in that segment, only 
in the San Diego segment, the second largest nationality to be crossing 
into America was Russian. You have two countries with shortages of 
people. It should be ripe for reaching some sort of settlement.
  I think the United States is perceived to be, maybe rightfully so, 
overly partisan in this war, but somehow we should be prodding the 
Israelis or Turks or French or somebody to reach a conclusion here, for 
one, on humanitarian terms. I mean, for whatever reason, it is hard to 
find exact numbers of people who died in this war. I am old enough to 
remember the Vietnam war. They could give you the number of Americans 
who died right down to the individual digit, but for some reason you 
get wildly different numbers on the number of people who have died in 
this conflict.
  However, either way, there are a significant number of people dying, 
and the Biden administration should be looking for a way to wrap it up. 
It wasn't that long ago that we seemed to have good relations with both 
of these countries. The longer it drags on, the more we drive Russia 
into the arms of China, which isn't in anybody's best interests, and it 
is a little frustrating that we are not getting a rationalization by 
the Biden administration why we wouldn't try to end this. The American 
press maybe ought to spend a little bit of time asking the Biden 
administration whether they feel there is any end to this war.
  In any event, I call on the Biden administration to give us a new 
update in the auditorium, and I call on the press corps to start 
asking, is there any time when we are going to end this war.
  The next issue I think I should bring up, because they keep talking 
about it on the news without giving us any new information, is the 
transgender situation. Usually when we talk about it, we talk about it 
with regard to biological men going into the women's locker room or 
biological men competing in women's sports.
  However, I think a more significant question is: Why are there 
apparently more transgender people now than during the rest of my life? 
It seems to me the Europeans have reached the conclusion that one of 
the reasons for this wave of transgenderism is, people keep talking 
about it on TV and in academic settings. The more one talks about it, 
the more people begin to think that this is perhaps the route they 
should go.
  I talked to someone about a month ago, 6 weeks ago, who, I guess I 
will call a recovering transgender, a woman, who now regrets it. She 
had the surgery, breasts removed at age 15, the whole ball of wax. It 
is not something that would have occurred to her, but she found 
something on the internet which informed her that maybe the reason she 
was unhappy is that she really was a boy. She went down the path. She 
went to the gender reassignment doctors, who apparently make a living 
on this. They talked her into the idea that, yes, the reason she was an 
unhappy little 13-year-old girl is because she was really a boy. She 
went through testosterone treatments, puberty blockers, and eventually 
even had her breasts cut out, which is a true tragedy, and now she 
regrets it.

                              {time}  2000

  I think the thing we ought to take out of it--and I have read this in 
another places, as well--people who are--

[[Page H4023]]

nobody should ever be mean or that sort of thing, but people who are 
overly solicitous or overly accepting of this transgender lifestyle 
wind up encouraging more people, other people to adapt this lifestyle.
  Every study out there shows these people wind up very, very, very 
unhappy and miserable, and sometimes even wind up committing suicide. 
So I would hope that the American press corps would put a new narrative 
out there rather than just persuading people that this is all a 
positive development.
  They ought to take about where people wind up who wind up going 
through the surgery. They ought to spend a little bit of time talking 
about why it appears there are so many more transgender people today 
than there were 30 years ago, and the answer is obvious. It is 
presented favorably as a lifestyle for a lot of young people, and when 
it is presented favorably, a number of young people get on the 
internet, read about it, decide to adapt this lifestyle, which is 
obviously only going to lead to misery and which does lead into misery.
  I would ask the press corps to be a little bit more open-minded or 
publish a little bit more as to why we seem to have more transgenders 
than the pass. Is it like the Europeans have discovered, a matter of 
the more we talk about it the more we have people like this.
  Maybe then we will realize that the goal should not be to have 
dramatic surgeries on young people's bodies. The goal should be on 
pushing this kind of to the side and not have so many people adapt the 
transgender lifestyle in the first place.
  The next topic I am going to take up, which we haven't taken up this 
session, but I think should be taken up next session or sometime in the 
near future because it has such a big influence on America is that of 
the breakdown of the family and the lack of fathers in homes, which is 
bad, not only for the children, but it is bad for the father, as well.
  In the 1960s, in which I think it was maybe the biggest domestic 
policy blunder in this country's history, under Lyndon Johnson, tons of 
money was aimed at families with children, but because the percent of 
poverty was determined by your income level as a practical matter, this 
money was conditioned upon not having a man in the household.
  In other words, if you had mother and father both working in the 
household, by definition, they were not in poverty. But if father was 
somewhere else and mother was alone, say, with two or three kids, and 
mother did not have a job, she was considered in poverty.
  This program said that if you are in poverty, or the programs, the 
Great Society, as it was called then--they should have called it the 
war on marriage--under the war on marriage, people who did not get 
married were given free housing at the time. So then they dialed back a 
little, given a check. They were given free food. They could be given 
free education. They would be given free medical care and given all 
these free things.
  Basically what they did is they set up the family without a dad as a 
self-contained unit. Only 7 percent of the births in the United States 
at the beginning of the sixties were born without a mother and a father 
in the home. Now, we are over 40 percent.
  I think, well, there are parents of all backgrounds doing yeoman's 
work, doing a tremendous job raising their children, and we don't want 
to denigrate them at all.
  But the statistics would show that whether you are looking at crime 
rates or educational achievement, depression, children, in general, are 
happier with both parents in the home because not everybody is up to 
raising kids in that environment.
  You would have to be blind not to realize the reason we have gone 
from 7 percent to over 40 percent is the great society and all these 
programs in which to get benefits, or you do get benefits if both 
parents are not around, and almost always that means the man is not 
around.
  Other programs like earned income tax credit, which was, I think, not 
a very good program thought up by the Republicans and Jack Kemp, were 
also conditioned upon getting the check. You don't want to have two 
parents working in the household.
  I would hope that we would do a subcommittee or something on this 
problem, get back to the good old days where depression and youth 
suicide was less than it is today, drug use a fraction of what it is 
today and, in order to do that, we have to change the incentives that 
were put into place by Lyndon Johnson.
  This, by the way, was known by the end of the 1960s. I hate to cite 
this study because it is so overcited, but Patrick Moynihan, by the 
late sixties, had pointed out what a disaster it was to have incentives 
in which the father wasn't in the home. So this is not new things I am 
talking about today.
  We knew this was a mistake by 1967, by 1968, by 1969, but Congress, 
either because they did not have the will, or because there is a 
radical element that Black Lives Matter represents, in which an 
element, a Marxist element wants to get rid of what they call the 
western prescribed nuclear family, and this is certainly a way to do 
it, but, for whatever reason, we have not adequately changed incentives 
in the 1960s.
  Made a little think to the right direction under Newt Gingrich and 
Bill Clinton in the 1990s, but since then it has all been downhill. I 
think we have to ask ourselves, was it a good idea to do all we could 
to set up the single parent as the sole parent in a child's life.
  I realize this is little bit different than a divorce situation, a 
little bit different than a widow situation, but there is no question 
there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of men in children's 
lives beginning in the 1960s.
  I want to point to something else, too, about this issue that a lot 
of times people don't take into account. This is something that George 
Gilder, who was a great sociologist--he is still alive today--but he 
wrote a book called ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980. At the time Ronald 
Reagan was sworn in, the book received a lot of positive press at that 
time. It has now been forgotten.

  What Gilder pointed out is not only are two parents important for the 
child but it is also important for the man because a lot of times the 
man's self-worth comes from--just like the woman's self-worth--comes 
from raising children. It is the most important thing in life.
  As a result of all these welfare programs in the 1960s, you have a 
lot of families without men in the household; the man had no purpose. 
This is why I think you see so much crime lately, so much drug abuse, 
because I think a lot of these men who were supposed to get self-worth 
out of children have kind of been kicked out of their home. If they 
actually did try to work and support their family, they may be 
materially less well off, or their children would be materially less 
well off than if dad wasn't around at all.
  Like I said, that goes for all the different benefits. There is a 
benefit called section 42 housing in which people taking advantage of 
section 42 housing, not only do you have to be in poverty to get it, 
but section 42 housing is frequently superior in quality to what people 
who are not on government programs get.
  Because section 42 housing is usually very new housing because the 
government pays for so much of the housing or to build the housing, 
people build section 42 low-income housing nicer than regular old 
apartments that are being built now; but that would be an example of a 
bad program that has bad results.
  The next topic that I would like to take up, the final topic, which I 
seem to address every week, but I think we should address again, 
because every one of these appropriation bills that comes before this 
place is subject to debate, either on this floor or in the Rules 
Committee, with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  This country has, for the last 50 years, at least with regard to 
universities--it looks like it is going to end or to a degree end 
because of a recent court decision. For 50 years, we have had programs 
designed to hire people or promote people or fire people or let people 
into colleges and universities or give businesses government contracts 
based on people's race and gender too.
  There are two rationalizations for this, but the press never spends 
any time determining whether these rationalizations are right or wrong. 
One

[[Page H4024]]

rationalization is that certain groups of people were discriminated 
against all the way back to slavery days, and, more recently, Jim Crow, 
that sort of thing.
  The other rationalization is that in a workplace setting, diversity 
is a good thing and that we should, therefore, force or mandate 
businesses to hire people based on where their ancestors came from 200 
years ago.
  First of all, the idea that we owe people something--when you look at 
the people who are beneficiaries of these programs, many of them do not 
have any ancestors who were in America prior to the institution of 
these programs.
  If somebody, say, who is Black from Jamaica immigrates to the United 
States in 1965, after Jim Crow ended, well after slavery, is there any 
reason why that person should receive preference?
  Recently, the Biden administration has tried to give preferences to 
what they call North African or Middle Eastern people. So if I come 
here from Egypt or Syria or Algeria today, and I am not even a citizen, 
according to the Biden administration, we should make sure--kind of 
weigh in on companies, universities I think they would like to weigh in 
on admissions, and make sure we give preferences to people from Algeria 
or Syria who are not even in this country yet.
  I don't know why we don't have that debate. We also ought to have a 
debate whether we ought to add a new so-called minority group of North 
Africans and Middle Easterners.
  With regard to diversity, I think we also have a problem. I guess the 
idea behind diversity is a pure racist would say that someone's view of 
the world or the way they tackle a job is going to be dependent upon 
where their great-great-great-great-grandparents came from.
  Now, I reject that idea. The idea that if I were to--I am not--but 
the idea that if I had a great-grandparent who was born in Peru, I 
would have a different view of the world than my next-door neighbor 
whose great-grandparents were from Germany. That is kind of a racist 
thing on its face, but that is what the diversity argument boils down 
to, that we should look at people, not on their viewpoint today, not on 
their personal experiences to this point in life.
  If we have two people who both grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 
houses next to each other, and one was one-quarter Mexican and one 
wasn't Mexican, that they would carry different viewpoints into the 
workplace, and it was important to get both viewpoints, even though, 
perhaps the person from Latin America had never been to a Latin 
American country in their life.
  But the idea behind this program--and, by the way, you self-identify 
as to what your group is--the idea behind the program is it is 
important to get the viewpoint of somebody whose grandfather or great-
grandfather happened to be from a different country. Again, even though 
in the case, say, of a Latin American, people would not even know that 
that is true.
  But this is a rationalization used for these rather high-handed 
programs that, as a practical matter, causes both the government people 
who are hiring and the businesses who do business with the government 
to hire based on ancestry.

                              {time}  2015

  I want to point out that I was actually talking to somebody from 
India today--of Indian ancestry. He wondered about this program because 
he was from India, and in India there are many different subgroups that 
sometimes don't get along. He thought the United States was alone in 
that we got along so well and it was such a wonderful thing we have 
going here, why in the world with us getting along so well would we try 
to duplicate countries like Nigeria or Sri Lanka or Iraq? Why would we 
try to duplicate what they are doing in other countries where the 
elections are contests between ethnic groups? These diversity, equity, 
and inclusion programs are designed to cause people not to view 
themselves as an American but view themselves as a Cuban American or a 
Mexican American or an Asian American or a Pacific Islander.
  In other words, they are going to view themselves when they vote and 
at other times as a representative of where their ancestors came from 
perhaps even decades, if not, centuries ago.
  I am afraid one of the reasons for these programs I ran across 
recently, I heard of someone who--I don't really like the phrase, but 
would today be considered by people who are proponents of these 
programs as a person of color--and this person, because they were from 
south of the border, their employer, once they asked them where their 
ancestry was--before I was in an elected position, the places that I 
worked, we never asked people where their ancestry was, but nowadays we 
ask them--and this large employer decided to hold breakout groups of 
people based on their ethnicity.
  We are going to have the Black group meet over there and the Hispanic 
group meet over there and the Asian group meet over there, and what 
happened is the diversity consultant--an occupation which shouldn't 
exist in America, by the way--the diversity consultant tried to tell 
this person that they were put upon and how they should think because 
they had an ancestor from south of the border.
  Now think how ridiculous that is. This person, who was just a fine, 
regular American never viewed themselves any different from anybody 
else, is being told because of where their ancestors came from, south 
of the border, that they ought to have certain beliefs, including 
certain political beliefs, which I think is the reason why the Biden 
administration is pushing this sort of thing.
  They want to tell people that if you are from Mexico or you are from 
Colombia or you are from Nigeria or you are from India that you are put 
upon and that you ought to have certain political beliefs.
  It is better to cut this thing right away. We have a shortage of 
people, workers in this country. The idea that we have people going to 
college to be diversity experts is appalling. I am glad my colleagues 
again and again are trying to take these diversity, equity, and 
inclusion bureaucrats out of the Federal bureaucracy, but there are way 
too many of them in the bureaucracy of individual big businesses around 
the country. It is the wimps who run these big businesses who feel that 
they have to kowtow to the diversity lobby, the special interest group, 
and they are instituting these programs by themselves.
  I think it is time we had a public discussion here as to whether this 
whole diversity, equity, inclusion thing makes any sense. I can go 
through topics that should be brought up by talk show hosts, by service 
clubs, what have you.
  Should we identify people by where their ancestors came from? If they 
self-identify, should we be identifying people by where their great-
grandmother or great-grandfather came from? That is an interesting 
question.
  If we are going to give preferences based upon where your great-
great-grandfather is from, should we see if there is any true diversity 
there before you say you should take my contract ahead of the other 
guy's contract or you should hire me ahead of the other guy? Tell us 
what you bring to the table because your great-great-grandmother was 
from Mexico. How do you think different than the other guy?
  Let's have that discussion. We are not having that discussion.
  Should you, again, be able to self-identify? If I am seven-eighths 
German and one-eighth Mexican, is it right that on the form I can put 
down that I am a Mexican and I should be able to say I bring the view 
of Mexican Americans to my engineering firm?
  They can also talk about, in certain jobs, what is the benefit of 
diversity? If we are talking about an engineering job, is the way I 
engineer the building of a bridge any different because I am one-
quarter Mexican? That doesn't make any sense, but that is the position 
of the people who push these programs.
  Let's have a discussion on that. Another discussion is, before we get 
this divisiveness going on forever, how long is this going to happen? 
This began in earnest--I think under John Kennedy, but it really began 
in earnest under Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and at the time I am sure 
nobody in a million years dreamed that we would still have this stuff 
almost 67 years later.

[[Page H4025]]

  Should we have a discussion? How long are we going to do this? Again, 
let's have a discussion. If part of this is supposed to be a way to 
make up for past sins, why are we giving benefits here to people who 
may not even be citizens yet? Why are we giving benefits to people who 
just moved here from Syria? Should that be considered a different sort 
of person subject to benefits?
  Let's have a discussion there.
  In any event, I hope as we write more and more about the Supreme 
Court case and preferences in college admissions, I hope people begin 
to ask some of these questions as to whether or not they make any sense 
at all whatsoever.
  I leave here hoping that our news media and this Congress spend a 
little more time updating themselves on what is going on in Ukraine. I 
hope they spend a little bit more time wondering as to whether we have 
this transgender crisis even a little bit. Just because we talk about 
it, if we weren't talking about it so much, we would have a fraction of 
the number of transgenders in the first place.

  I think we should spend some time looking at the premise that the 
diversity, equity, and inclusion is built upon and answering questions 
like, should we be adding Egyptians and Syrians to the mix? Should I be 
able to label myself a minority if I am one-quarter a minority? Should 
I be able to label myself picked upon if my parents have given me $5 
million?
  These are questions that should be asked on the diversity level. I 
think we should be asking is it time to stop government programs which 
have resulted in an increase in fatherlessness from 7 to 40 percent, 
programs I think which hurt people, and particularly hurt men, have 
been around since the 1960s. There is no reason for these programs to 
continue forever.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________