[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 142 (Thursday, September 12, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H5225-H5226]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
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MAJOR 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. Well, it has been about 6 weeks now since Congress last
met, and I think it is time to review some of the major issues of the
day that I do not feel the mainstream press is doing an adequate job of
covering.
We continue to have people stream across our southern border. The
Biden administration has made some changes after 3\1/2\ years mildly
reducing the amount. Nevertheless, in the most recent month available,
we still have an estimated 145,000 people crossing the southern border
per month.
It is not difficult to go back to the prior administration and find
monthly numbers 4 years ago of about 8,000 people a month. You can say
that is due to COVID, but if you go back even before COVID, you would
have monthly figures of about 11,000 people crossing the southern
border, so we go from 11,000 to 145,000. That is despite the fact that
we are pausing, waiting for another 30,000 a month to cross as they
redo their parole program, so we will have an extra 30,000 from Cuba,
Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In addition to that, we have another
6,000 to 7,000 a month in another program coming across from
Afghanistan.
Why do we not talk more about this, the scope of the problem that we
have--even after the reduction--10 or 12 times as many people crossing
the southern border compared to the last administration? And that is
just the numbers coming here.
In addition to that, we have the human tragedy of people coming here,
the people drowning in the Rio Grande which they don't report, the
people drowning in the Pacific Ocean, which they don't report, the
people dehydrating in the Arizona desert, which they don't report.
The last time I was down there I asked one more time the woman who
was in charge of vetting, or meeting the new people crossing the
southern border, and she admitted a high number of women were being
sexually assaulted as they came north, north through the lands that are
controlled by the Mexican drug cartels.
Where is the party that purports to be the party of women as these
women are being sexually molested?
These are issues that should be covered daily in the newspapers in
this country, but the scope of the problem is not covered. There is no
reason why this 140,000 a month, 150,000 a month should not be reduced
down to 10 or 11,000 a month as it was 4 years ago.
I would like to see a little bit more coverage about that in the
newspapers.
The next thing that should be talked about is while we were out, Mark
Zuckerberg talked about the degree to which he was leaned on to
restrict speech in his business.
Freedom of speech is something a lot of us have taken for granted,
although I am a little bit afraid that the average American is
beginning to waver on their commitment to free speech. Nevertheless, it
is something that should be brought up as we head toward the elections
in November.
Is it appropriate that Mark Zuckerberg's huge company, one of the
wealthiest people in America, should be leaned on by the Federal
Government to restrict the free flow of information?
And, by the way, the more this happens, the more the American public
begins to accept it, which is really scary. The share of U.S. adults
that say the Federal Government should restrict false information--and,
of course, who is going to determine what false information is?--has
gone up from 40 percent to 55 percent. Over half of Americans think the
Federal Government ought to weigh in on restricting false information.
I think this is particularly a problem, sadly, with the Democratic
Party. When I was a child, the Democratic Party prided itself on
unfettered free speech, and they got into things like pornography and
that sort of thing. Now, it becomes the Democratic Party who is more in
favor of restricting speech compared to Republicans, 70 percent to 40
percent.
Americans have to wonder: Do we want to turn this country into a
country more similar to the Soviet Union or Maoist China in which the
government decides what is truth and what is not truth?
This is one of the things that makes America unique, one of the
reasons why we are proud to be Americans, and now people are beginning
to say that this is perhaps not a good idea at all.
But now I will deal with the third issue that I think is incredibly
important, maybe other than the southern border, the most important
issue facing America today, and that is the breakdown of the family.
There have always been people--people that say mom and apple pie is
everybody's favorite, they are profamily and wish they could have a mom
and a dad at home. In fact, there have always been powerful people in
history beginning with the radical leftists in the mid-1800s who felt
the family was restricting and felt that it is something that we should
break away from, destroy. This is one of the things that began to come
out of the French Revolution in the 1780s, and to this day, some people
view the French Revolution as something that should be looked upon
favorably.
In 1848, Karl Marx--and many people read Karl Marx to this day--
believed there was a need to abolish the family. He put that in ``The
Communist Manifesto.''
Mr. Speaker, 50 years later with the rise of the feminist movement,
or 100 years later, radical feminist, Kate Millett, said that
destroying the American family was necessary to bring about the
cultural revolution that she wanted. Powerful feminists in the 1960s, a
time of upheaval in America, a time when changes were made in America,
the radical feminists wanted to weaken the American family.
A lot of times people aren't that outspoken about it because I
believe the majority of Americans believe strong families are good, but
there is a small minority, a very powerful minority, who wants to break
down the family.
Angela Davis, a powerful radical, well respected by the hard left, in
the sixties, seventies, and eighties came out against the traditional
family.
Later on, Black Lives Matter, which exploded on the scene about 5
years ago, called for an end of the western-prescribed nuclear-family
structure. Think about all the businesses that gave money to Black
Lives Matter. Think of all the prominent politicians--many of them in
this room. Now, they may say, oh, I wasn't for that part of their
program. Think about that, people wanted to get rid of the ``western-
prescribed nuclear family.'' Black Lives Matter were all on board and
presented it to be a positive thing.
Now, to what degree has this institution, the American Government and
the U.S. Congress played in weakening the American family?
Beginning in the 1960s with the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson--who I
think was the worst President we ever had certainly until now--began a
program in which an ever-expanding number of entitlements were doled
out almost conditioned upon not having two parents, usually not a
father, in the household.
George Gilder in the late seventies wrote a book ``Wealth and
Poverty'' about this program. And what he pointed out is that certain
segments of society felt it was great when somebody got pregnant out of
wedlock because they would be eligible for all sorts of government
benefits, be it food stamps, in particular; be it the low-income
housing tax credits, which also benefited the very rich; be it the
earned income tax credit, which is much easier to get if both parents
are
[[Page H5226]]
not living together; be it the TANF grants, which also seem to be
disproportionately doled out to families in which they get the man out
of the picture. If you add up all these programs--I am told there are
over 70 programs which, in essence, penalize couples who decide to get
married. It varies from person to person, obviously, how many different
programs they take advantage of, but it certainly is not unusual to
have people suffer a $20,000 penalty if a couple who have had a child
get married rather than living apart. Perhaps in the first couple years
of these programs people were not aware of the effect of them, but they
have unquestionably, over the next 30 to 40 years, greatly reduced the
number of children without a mother and father at home.
There was some progress made during the Clinton administration when
Newt Gingrich forced Bill Clinton reluctantly to pare back some of
these programs, but the programs are taking off again. Again, in his
proposed budget, President Biden, and presumably, certainly Kamala
Harris, have tried to grow these programs which are kind of conditioned
upon not having two working adults in the home.
I hope the press talks about this marriage penalty and forces our
candidates to take a side one way or the other as to whether this is a
good thing or a bad thing. In any event, it has fundamentally changed
the American family. I think in many ways it has made America a less
livable place since these programs went into effect, since the Great
Society went into effect, and the question is: Should Congress, when
they return in January, consider the fact that we are spending so much
money to try to destroy the nuclear family as the great feminists
thought we should, as Karl Marx thought we should, as the French
revolutionaries thought we should, or should we step back from these
programs, try to tailor them a little bit more to not display the hate
for the old-fashioned American, westernized, nuclear family?
I would hope that we would get some commitments that we are going to
look at these programs.
One more thing I want to address here for the American public that I
think we have not dealt with to the degree to which we should is a lot
has been said about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. For whatever
reason, as we write the history of the last 4 years in this building,
we have focused on the Inflation Reduction Act but not on other acts
that also passed during that time period that are responsible for the
huge amount of inflation that Americans are dealing with--inflation
that I think is weakening American families because in an old-
fashioned, American family you would have a house with backyard for the
children to play in. Now it has become increasingly difficult to afford
a house, much less even afford food.
So we have to remember there were actually three programs that were
passed. Under normal circumstances every year in this institution we
pass a regular appropriation bill or what people back home would refer
to as a budget bill of about $1.7 trillion. That is really too much
because we keep driving our country more and more into debt. But in
addition to the regular $1.7 trillion program, there were three other
bills that were passed: an American Rescue Plan of $1.8 trillion; an
infrastructure bill--and a few irresponsible Republicans voted for that
as well--of $1.2 trillion; and an Inflation Reduction Act of another
$1.2 trillion.
What is not reported on and should be reported on is as outlandish as
these spending bills were, the Inflation Reduction Act was originally
called the Build Back Better Act, and that asked for $3.5 trillion. If
it weren't for the Democrat Senator from West Virginia paring that $3.5
trillion down to $1.2 trillion, it would have been literally $2
trillion more.
I think our slumbering press corps ought to be asking the people in
this building: Do you wish that that act which started out at $3.5
trillion and was reduced to $1.2 trillion, should we be adding another
$2 trillion to that figure or not?
Do you think it was a good or bad thing that Senator Manchin wound up
weighing in and reducing that act to a still irresponsible $1.2
trillion?
I think it is important for the American public to know there was not
reticence among the Democrat Party in passing it. They wanted a
significantly higher spending amount, and I can't imagine what the cost
of a house or the cost of a dozen eggs or whatever would have been had
they gotten that $3.5 trillion that they all seemed to want at that
time.
In any event, we have covered five issues that all candidates should
be asked to respond to, issues that the press corps should be bringing
forth so that they force Congress here to deal with these issues.
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I think when our forefathers wanted a free press, they anticipated
the press doing a little bit of work on their own. So we hope when we
return next week we read a little bit more on the difference in
immigration laws for immigrants coming across our southern border
between today and where we were at 4\1/2\ years ago.
I wish we would have more discussion as to whether penalizing people
over $20,000 per couple for getting married is good public policy.
I think we should be asking people if they come back here next
January: Are they going to want to add the other $2 trillion that
Senator Manchin pulled out of the Inflation Reduction Act or Build Back
Better Act?
Is there concern that a growing number of Americans, including, by
the way, the Biden administration, have apparently leaned on Mark
Zuckerberg to restrict free speech?
Additionally, are we going to see any more of this from those
politicians who get re-elected and are returned here in January?
Hopefully, over the weekend some of these members of the press corps
can wake up and cover these issues.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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