[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.

                          ____________________