[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 101 (Friday, June 14, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4102-H4104]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1200
ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Iowa (Mrs.
Miller-Meeks).
Women Veterans Recognition Day
Mrs. MILLER-MEEKS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, Representative
Grothman, for yielding me the time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Women Veterans Recognition Day,
which is the anniversary of President Truman's signing of the Women's
Armed Forces Integration Act, which allowed, for the first time, women
to serve as regular members of the military.
While only about one in six Americans serving in the Armed Forces are
women, they are responsible for some of the most important
accomplishments in military history. Whether it is the Hello Girls from
World War I who connected the U.S. military's communications in
imperative ways, the thousands of volunteer nurses who saved lives in
the Vietnam war, or the hundreds of thousands of women currently in
active service, women in the military are playing an active role in
ensuring the safety of our Nation, and I was one of those as a 24-year
Army veteran.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in celebrating all the
brave women who have put their lives on the line for this incredible
Nation we call home.
Honoring Ronald Knoche
Mrs. MILLER-MEEKS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of one of my
constituents, Ronald Knoche, for being named a 2024 Top 10 Public Works
Leader of the Year by the American Public Works Association.
As the most prestigious national award in the public works
profession, Ron and the other honorees are recognized for their
professionalism, expertise, and personal dedication to improving the
quality of life in their communities through the advancement of public
works services during their career.
Knoche has served Iowa City for 25 years. He joined the city as a
civil engineer in 1999, was promoted to senior engineer in 2001, and
the city engineer in 2003.
In 2015, Knoche was promoted to public works director. In this role,
Knoche oversees the city's engineering, equipment, resource management,
streets, wastewater, and water divisions.
Mr. Speaker, I congratulate Ron. I am very proud of him.
Johnson County Engineer
Mrs. MILLER-MEEKS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of Johnson
County, Iowa, engineer, Greg Parker, on being named the 2024 Urban
County Engineer of the Year by the National Association of County
Engineers.
Mr. Parker's career has spanned 40 years and earned him a reputation
for being a national authority on pavement reconstruction.
Mr. Parker and the Johnson County Secondary Roads Department are
responsible for 915 miles of county highways and the 213 bridges and
infrastructure they contain.
As the department director, Mr. Parker oversees construction and
year-round maintenance with 50 employees.
I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Greg Parker for
winning this award and wishing him all the best as he continues to pave
the way for all Iowans.
Peace Corps Volunteers
Mrs. MILLER-MEEKS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the seven
amazing Peace Corps volunteers from Iowa's first district who are
currently serving worldwide on behalf of our great Nation.
By freely providing their various skill sets, such as healthcare,
education, and peacekeeping in the world's developing nations, these
volunteers are on the front lines of ensuring a better world for all of
us.
Despite the stresses and tribulations the job may provide, these
seven heroes have a true unending passion for helping people.
Furthermore, I would like to specifically congratulate two of our
Peace Corps volunteers from Iowa's First Congressional District,
Katheryn Peck and Kent Rice, for completing their tenure in the
Dominican Republic on May 17, 2024, and returning home to Iowa.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating these
incredible Peace Corps volunteers and wish them the best on their
continued journeys.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, Representative Grothman, for
yielding me time.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the first issue I would like to take up
this afternoon that has not received anywhere near the discussion it
demands in this Chamber concerns the month of June. As everyone knows,
June is Dairy Month in the United States of America.
The number one dairy product which most milk goes for in this country
is cheese, and the number one cheese-producing State in the country is
Wisconsin. The number one district for dairy farms happens to be the
Sixth Congressional District of Wisconsin.
In any event, there are many things that good cheese is used in, and
Wisconsin cheese is the best. This was proven once again in the 35th
biennial World Champion Cheese Contest, which is the most respected and
honored technical cheese and butter competition in the world.
Earlier this year, Wisconsin cheesemakers demonstrated their
exceptional craftmanship earning 117 cheese awards, more awards than
the combined total of the subsequent six highest-earning countries.
Wisconsin's cheesemaking heritage goes back more than 180 years. The
State is home to 1,200 licensed cheesemakers who produce more than 600
varieties. Sometime if you come to Wisconsin, spend an evening driving
around the countryside, and you will see many cheesemakers open and
working past midnight.
Today, please pick up some delicious Wisconsin cheese, and enjoy it
no matter which type you prefer. Whether you are purchasing it from the
Cascade Cheese Company, Cedar Valley, Gibbsville, Grande
Cheese, Henning's Cheese, Baker Cheese, Laack Brothers Cheese, Masters
Gallery, LaClare, Sargento, Sartori, Pine River, Union Star, Willow
Creek, or Widmer's cheese out of Theresa, they are all great.
Again, whether you buy provolone, mozzarella, Colby, or sharp
cheddar, they are all tremendous. I would like to one more time thank
the wonderful cheesemakers in Wisconsin for making Wisconsin America's
Dairyland.
The second issue that we have to discuss today, and it has been
discussed just about every week, but we still don't discuss it enough,
is the number one issue facing America today, and that is the people
flowing across the southern border.
Our office has been in contact with the Border Patrol. They do not
see any change in the people coming across the border. I want to remind
people in the last month for which we have statistics--and the press
should be waiting for the next month's numbers to come out--in April,
we were at 205,000 migrants remaining in the interior, and that is
before you count another 30,000 paroled from Cuba, Haiti, and Central
America. That is an all-time record for that month. With it, as always,
comes about 9,000 unaccompanied minors. If we found an unaccompanied
12-year-old wandering around the streets at night, we would think that
was a scandal, but every month we let another 8 or 9,000 unaccompanied
minors come into this country.
I call upon the press corps to finally report the number of people
who come across this May and make a guess at the number of additional
people who are being paroled.
[[Page H4103]]
A year ago in May, we were at 196,000. Now, what you have to do is
you have to take the official number, add up the got-aways, and then
you should add up those paroled to see where we stand this year. When
it comes out, it should be a banner headline, and something that all
Americans should be deeply concerned about. Whether you are talking
about illegals committing crimes, whether they are putting pressure on
local budgets at the school board, whether they are changing the
culture of America because they think worldwide most people do not have
the respect and love for freedom that we do in this country, but for
whatever purpose, this is a real tragedy and something that is going to
permanently change America.
I beg the press corps to give us a banner headline, and see where the
May figures line up with those of a year ago.
The next issue that hasn't been talked about anywhere near enough
concerns what is going on in the Middle East. You know, one more time
when I leave here today, I am going to see protestors saying that the
Arabs who live in Gaza--they call them Palestinians--need their own
country, and they are living in some sort of horrible situation in a
country and that even though Israelis don't live there, Israelis have
ultimate control over the Gaza Strip.
In a report which was in a story that was underreported, but we all
should be aware of, recently another agreement was reached with Israel
and another country around the world to bring more people, non-Jewish
people, into Israel to perform work in this wonderful country.
I have had the privilege to go to Israel. I have seen what they have
done at their border, along the Jordan River, about all the immigration
that happens, about all the industry that is going on there, but in any
event, it appears as though under a recent agreement immediately 2,000
people from Ecuador on the other side of the world are agreeing to come
to Israel to work. Under this agreement there is a hope that eventually
they will work their way up to 25,000 people from Ecuador coming to
Israel.
Now, that is in addition to a sea of other people who are already
there from India, from Thailand, from Philippines, from China, from
Nepal, from Sri Lanka, from Moldova, Malawi, from Kenya. All around the
globe, people are coming to Israel to work.
Nevertheless, there are some malcontents in this country who feel
that it is difficult living in a country adjacent to Israel, a country
which, by the way, the people in Gaza many of them had an opportunity
to work in Israel where they were making better wages, and probably had
safer jobs than almost anywhere else in the Arab world.
I hope--and I haven't seen it anywhere in the newspaper--the press
picks up on this story that 25,000 people from Ecuador are hopeful to
come to Israel. Israel, in so many ways, reminds me of the United
States. In the United States we have hundreds of thousands of people
crossing the southern border. We are just a little bit shy of a million
people being legally sworn in to become new citizens in America every
year from all over the globe. Nevertheless, we have people in this
Chamber, actually earlier today, making a claim that America is a
horribly racist country, and we have to do something to fundamentally
change it because it is so bad.
People make fun of this country, but the whole rest of the world
would rather live here, apparently, than anywhere else.
I hope the press picks up the point that we have people from all
around the globe coming to Israel and that another 25,000 people from
Ecuador want to go there, and that would give an indication of what it
is really like to live in Israel even from countries that are not
primarily Jewish.
Now, we are going the pickup another story that I think--probably the
border right now is the number one issue that the United States has to
deal with. Under normal circumstances when I talk to people back home,
they tell me that things in America are getting worse, particularly at
my age when you get up to 60, 65. They feel that when they were growing
up, America was a better nation, and they wonder what happened.
When I ask them why they think it was a better nation, they hesitate
for a minute, but finally they say that they think we have had a
breakdown in the family. It is true, particularly with older people, we
went from 1960 when about 95 percent of the newborn births had both a
mother and father at home to more recently only about 60 percent have a
mother and father at home. We have had a dramatic decrease in the
number of children born that are living without a mother or a father.
Now, any type of family can be successful, but common sense and the
statistics will tell you it would be nicer if you had a father at home.
Nevertheless, we are going in the opposite direction. You may say,
Glenn, why are you even wasting time on that. Everybody is for the old-
fashioned family, why do you spend time on that? Actually, if you look,
there have been people who, over a period of time, have felt that the
road to paradise necessarily means getting rid of the nuclear family.
{time} 1215
We know Karl Marx himself, who is still studied in our universities,
was opposed to what he referred to as the bourgeois family. He felt it
would vanish as a matter of course when capitalism disappears. He
believed the only reason for the family is because we have private
property, and that served as the basis for traditional marriage, which
it didn't. In any event, Karl Marx did want to get rid of the nuclear
family.
Did anybody else carry this odious thing? Or was he just a guy who
died almost without family and not missed at the time he passed away?
I think we have to turn to the 1960s when we started the great
welfare state, the Great Society, of Lyndon Johnson. At that time,
there were some leaders who were very well-known to anybody who lived
through that era who did want to get rid of the family.
The first person I will mention is Kate Millett. Maybe some people
aren't familiar with Kate Millett. She was one of the primary feminists
during the 1960s, and I will bet to this day most Americans are under
the mistaken impression that people like Kate Millett were a force for
good. Actually, Kate Millett, we should all be aware, was another
person who wanted to ``destroy the American family.''
In a back-and-forth with one of her other audiences, she demanded,
how do we make a cultural revolution? She felt we needed a cultural
revolution. Her follower said by destroying the American family. She
said, how do we destroy the American family? It is by destroying the
American patriarch--in other words, by getting the man out of the
family.
In the 1960s, one of the most prominent feminists, Kate Millett, and
her comments were echoed by others, felt that she had to destroy the
American family.
At the same time we had a Black Power movement, which I don't think
was embraced by the vast majority of Black Americans, but it did exist.
One of the primary leaders of that Black Power movement was Angela
Davis.
Anybody who lived in the 1970s remembers that name. What was Angela
Davis for? One of the things she was for was she wanted to get rid of
the family-based structure of oppression. In other words, she, as well,
felt a mother and father at home raising their children was a form of
oppression. Women must be liberated from the drudgery of full-time
childrearing.
She was given a great job at California State University at Santa
Cruz, where the left made sure she had a nice job for the rest of her
life even though she participated in or abetted murders that took place
in California at the time.
We have to remember that one of the things that Angela Davis wanted,
because she is primarily remembered for being a member of the Black
Power movement, was to get rid of the nuclear family.
Mr. Speaker, how could one get rid of the family? I think Lyndon
Johnson, at the time when these radicals were flying high, hit upon it
by introducing a lot of subsidies in America as part of his Great
Society.
In order to get these subsidies, not always, but almost always, you
could not have a mother and father together because if you had a mother
and father together, then you would be earning
[[Page H4104]]
enough money that you wouldn't be considered in poverty, but once you
were in poverty, you were eligible for a variety of government
subsidies.
Mr. Speaker, these were government subsidies that you wouldn't get if
you had a mother and father at home, and let's say that father was
making, in today's income, $50,000 or $60,000. Whether it is food
stamps, whether it is low-income housing, whether it is daycare,
whether it was, at the time, AFDC, or whether it was a hugely poorly
done subsidy, the earned income tax credit, which kicked in in the
1990s, all of these benefits were conditioned upon not having a man in
the household earning a decent income. There were probably some
exceptions, and my detractors will point out somewhere a mother and
father and kids at home who are getting these subsidies. By and large,
they were subsidies not available to a family with a man and woman who
both worked or with one of the two working and making a decent wage.
Now, in this budget that President Biden has put forth, we have a
variety of new programs, almost all of which are adding to the marriage
penalty that the Great Society ushered in.
By the way, Mr. Speaker, when you look at that marriage penalty, it
varies from person to person, depending on how many jobs they took up.
It varies depending upon their income whether you are not working at
all or whether you are making $14,000 or $15,000 a year. There is
usually a huge medical benefit, as well.
What do we do in light of all of these programs? Robert Rector, who
is an expert in this field, believes there are 78 programs that all are
working toward a marriage penalty. All are working toward a world where
Kate Millett or Angela Davis or Karl Marx were looking for.
By the time you got done, it could be $15,000, $20,000, $25,000,
$30,000 that you would lose if you were a married couple as opposed to
having a single person raising the children at home.
Now, Mr. Speaker, you would think that, ultimately, people would wake
up and look at, not in every case but in general, all the possible
problems that we had with the government encouraging not having two
people living at home.
By the way, another one I should point out is something called Pell
grants. Pell grants are grants that go to children if they can say the
custodial parent is in poverty. They might have a father making
$100,000 a year, who knows, but Pell grants is another program kind of
pushing in that direction.
I will repeat an anecdote I have talked about before, but before we
expand Pell grants, we ought to think about it. I used to talk about
the marriage penalty about 12 years ago in Wisconsin at a variety of
Tea Party groups. I would go through all the programs that you got,
provided you didn't get married and had a low income.
I talked to a young woman afterward who was in the audience. I had
been talking to a Tea Party group. Anybody familiar with the Tea Party
at the time knows it was largely a bunch of people over 60 years old.
We had a young gal who was there tending bar in the room where I gave
the talk. I am guessing she was 25 years old.
I asked her what she thought about this marriage penalty and all
these programs. She told me: Well, me and my husband got married before
we had a child. None of my friends are getting married. They get free
college.
That was kind of my introduction to Pell grants in which the
government, for whatever reason, has decided to say that if you are not
married to someone with an income, then you are eligible to go to
college as well as your children may be eligible as well to get Pell
grants while the middle-class kid, the kid who is raised by a couple
who maybe has a middle-class income, they may not be able to afford
college for the kid, and that kid has to take out student loan debt.
Again, Pell grant is another program that is kind of designed to push
America more toward the paradise that some of these people want, or the
so-called paradise in which we do not have a mother and father at home.
In any event, in President Biden's budget, he wants to expand
government daycare, expand the earned income tax credit, which can
easily give you $6,000 or $10,000 if you have a couple of kids,
provided you don't have two parents working or anybody making more than
$16,000.
I should point out that all of these programs not only discourage
marriage, but they discourage work because usually to get the most out
of these programs, you want to work and make $14,000, $15,000, or
$16,000. You sure don't want to make $40,000 or $50,000 because they
will take away your benefits.
He wants more housing subsidies as opposed to staying with mom. He
wants to expand these Pell grants I just talked about.
So, I encourage my Republican colleagues to stand up against
President Biden's goal of further subsidizing and further trying to
break down the old-fashioned family.
By the way, I mentioned all the people whose goal it was to get rid
of the nuclear family. I should have included Black Lives Matter in
that group that wanted to get rid of the so-called Western-prescribed
nuclear family, which is really not Western. It happens all around the
world. That is a more recent group. Black Lives Matter had as one of
its goals to get rid of the nuclear family.
I encourage my colleagues to stand up to President Biden's goal of
further taxing the middle class or taxing certain groups to further
promote or subsidize the idea of raising families without both parents
in the home.
In any event, these are stories I wish the press would cover. This
marriage penalty has been going on for 60 years. Whenever I talk about
it, nobody has heard of it.
Where is the press corps? They ought to be talking about the huge
penalty.
Again and again when I get back to my district, I find young people
saying: We are not getting married because we lose the benefits.
Let's have the press corps pick up on that. Let's have the press
corps pick up on why Ecuador wants to send 25,000 people halfway around
the globe to work in Israel, and they can ponder if things are that
tough.
These people protesting out here on Independence Avenue should also
consider whether or not it is so tough living in Israel when actually
it is a paradise. People are coming from all around the globe.
The next thing that I want the press to pick up on is you should be
waiting every day when we get the new figures on the number of people
who came across our southern border in May and report if we are getting
another all-time record for May or not.
I know I am probably going to have to pick it up from some obscure
government website because, again, our press corps is asleep at the
switch on the issue of the decade.
Finally, if we want a little upbeat thing the press corps is not
paying enough attention to, remember: June is Dairy Month. Go home and
have some cheese.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________