[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 147 (Friday, September 20, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H5554-H5556]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      FOCUSING ON PRIORITY ISSUES

  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, there are a variety of issues that I think 
ought to be talked about, at least once, before we leave for our 
districts this Friday. They are topics I don't think the press is 
paying enough attention to, so one more time, I beg them to pay 
attention to these topics.
  The first one is the border. Our fiscal year wraps up on September 
30. Right now, we have 11 of the 12 months in the books for fiscal year 
2024.
  Now, something that I think has been underreported, we have one more 
time hit the all-time high of the number of people coming into this 
country who are--other than traditional means, I will say--coming 
across the southern border, in August, with 154,000 people. We have now 
hit 2,700,000 people for the year as a whole.
  This is by comparison with Donald Trump in his last entire year, 
which was a little under 100,000. Part of that year was COVID, but 
nevertheless, even the next year after that was well under the million 
total.
  It is a difficult number to get an exact count on. It includes people 
who have been released at the border. It includes what they call got-
aways, which are a more dangerous class of people. It includes people 
who have entered the country on what we call the CBP One app, which is 
something I don't think President Biden had the ability or 
constitutional authority to do. It includes other people who he has 
allowed across under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan 
program.
  Nevertheless, 11 months in with 1 month to go, we are at 2,700,000 
people entering the country, breaking the previous record in the third 
year of the Biden administration, giving us a total of what appears to 
be 20 times as many people entering the country than President Trump's 
last year.
  I think it would be useful at this time to deal with the argument 
that we have to allow some people here. Another number that I don't 
think is talked about enough, if you look in 3-year increments, we 
recently hit the all-time high--and we monitor when the new numbers 
come out--the all-time high of the number of people who were sworn in 
as legal citizens in the United States.
  In the last 3 years, we have had an average of just under 900,000 
people sworn in as legal citizens. By comparison, in both the Clinton 
and Bush years, we were around 700,000. In the 1960s, when I grew up, 
we were only a little over 100,000.
  The reason I point that out is, people who think we should ignore the 
laws kind of imply that it is very difficult to come here and that we 
are desperately in need of more people from other countries.
  Again, I repeat, in the last 3 years, we have had an average of just 
under 900,000 people sworn in, something that is the all-time record.
  We now should combine that with the 2,700,000 people, who--it is not 
exactly the same thing--have come across our southern border or are 
allowed in under these special programs by President Biden.
  It is important to remember the human cost of all these programs. In 
addition to changing the United States and having a lot of people who 
aren't

[[Page H5555]]

used to abiding by and necessarily revering or understanding our 
Constitution, the growing number of people coming across the southern 
border is where our fentanyl crisis comes in.
  I have to repeat, from illegal drugs, twice as many people are dying 
every year as died in 12 years of the Vietnam war. Mr. Speaker, 110,000 
people are dying from fentanyl, which I think is, in part, a function 
of the current administration and the Vice President when she was in 
charge of the southern border and allowing everything to come across.

                              {time}  1330

  I also want to point out that the last time I was at the border, I 
talked to a woman who was kind of in charge of talking to the women who 
were coming across the border, and she spoke in hushed tones over all 
of them that are being sexually assaulted.
  I know President Trump tried to bring this to the fore, and of 
course, he was attacked for being racist, for pointing out that there 
were a lot of sexual assaults done on the southern border.
  Another problem we have here is we are making the drug gangs, which 
are doing so much to control Mexico, wealthy.
  Every time I have been at the border, Border Patrol is under the 
impression that these brutal drug gangs that are responsible for so 
many murders in Mexico are making more money bringing people across the 
border than they are from selling drugs.
  I also point out as part of the over 2 million people who come here 
every month, 8,000 are unaccompanied minors.
  Of all the ridiculous ways the Biden administration is ignoring our 
southern border, the idea that we are letting 8,000 or 9,000 children 
come across the border without their parents is maybe the most 
outlandish thing you can think of.
  In this country, if a 10-year-old child is moving about the country, 
and we didn't know who their parents were, we would consider it a 
scandal, but that is what is routinely done at the southern border.
  Sometime in the next month, numbers will be released for the amount 
of people coming across the southern border in September.
  We already have the all-time record. I hope the press gives banner 
coverage to the new total of people coming into this country when the 
numbers are out for September, and we have the final fiscal year taken 
care of.
  Now, the next issue I don't think we have talked about. People do 
talk about inflation, and inflation is a big problem, and we know 
inflation is brought about when you spend money that you are not taking 
in.
  We know there were two big bills that were what we call supplemental 
bills, in addition to the regular bloated budget we pass around here.
  President Biden and the Democrats here passed something called the 
American Rescue Plan and an infrastructure bill.
  That infrastructure bill had some spending, which would have been 
done otherwise, but nevertheless, between the two, we were well over $2 
trillion.
  What isn't talked about enough, and I wish the press would point it 
out more, is there was another program called the Inflation Reduction 
Act.
  Now, the spending there was about $1.2 trillion; it is sometimes 
forgotten that it was the goal. From what I can see of every Democrat 
around here, except for the Senators from Arizona and West Virginia who 
held it up, they wanted that program to be about three times the normal 
size of what it is.
  Frequently in this Chamber, even from Republicans, they blame this 
inflation on the 1.2--it is hard to believe around here that they still 
don't have an exact number, but the 1 to 1.2 trillion in the Inflation 
Reduction Act.
  Actually, virtually every Democrat wanted that number to be three 
times as high, $3.5 trillion. I think given that that was the 
mainstream thinking of the Democratic party at the time, the press 
ought to talk a little bit more about that proposed bill that would 
have passed out of this House if it weren't for two brave Democrat 
Senators, Kyrsten Sinema, and Senator Manchin from West Virginia, who 
held it up.
  Things could have been a lot worse if you didn't have two moderate 
Senators stand up to the ultraradical, mainstream Democrats that we now 
have in the House and the U.S. Senate.
  Let's see a little bit more discussion about the high level of 
spending that people really wanted at that time.
  The third issue, which I think should be one of the major issues of 
the campaign, but because we have a comatose press corps, they don't 
talk about it, is the war on marriage and the degree to which the U.S. 
Government today has passed program after program--largely exploding in 
the sixties, but since then, many of these programs have been expanded 
and no new programs added to them--in which a single parent gets 
government money as long as they are not living with the other parent.
  As a practical matter, these programs have caused countless children 
to be raised without a father in the home because that is apparently 
what the U.S. Government wants to do.
  Whether you look at the food-share program, the low-income housing 
program, the SSI for handicapped children program, the earned income 
tax credit, the daycare program, the Pell Grant Program, they all give 
significantly more money to a family if both parents are not around, 
and I say that if a working spouse is not around.
  Usually this means that if a man joins the mother and children and 
has a decent job, a $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year job, all of a 
sudden, the mother would lose all of these other programs.
  That is why we have gone from very, very tiny amounts of single 
parenthood in the sixties to over 40 percent in the nineties, and we 
are now on the march again.
  This has fundamentally changed life in America, it has fundamentally 
changed what it is like growing up in America, and it is something that 
is not questioned.
  Our conservative commentators should talk about it, and if they 
really cared about the future of society, our journalism professionals 
ought to be talking about it.
  People sometimes wonder why the mom and dad at home is now so rare, 
like it was a mystery as to why that happened or an inadvertent effect 
of the Great Society pushed by Lyndon Johnson, in my mind, until now, 
the worst President we have ever had.
  Let's not forget that Karl Marx, who still has a lot of influence in 
academia, said that we had to abolish the American family to have the 
communist heaven that he wants.
  Actually, this thinking went before Karl Marx. It was also the 
thinking in the French Revolution where people who wanted to get rid of 
the church felt that one of the things they should do is try to break 
up the family.
  During the sixties, this thinking was again out there. They weren't 
things that everybody read, but they were the type of things the 
intellectuals who sometimes decide the course of history have read.
  Feminist Kate Millett said that destroying the American family was 
necessary to bring about a leftwing cultural revolution.
  Later on, Angela Davis, another prominent radical at that time who 
was a communist, also came out against the American family and 
particularly the role of men in the family.
  More recently, Black Lives Matter called for ending the Western 
prescribed nuclear family structure. We all know that some of the major 
businesses and corporations in America gave money to Black Lives Matter 
even after that was put on their website.
  Two of the three co-founders of Black Lives Matter prided themselves 
on being Marxist and wanted to get rid of the American family.
  This did not stop Black Lives Matter from being a group that many 
politicians wanted to associate with, and they would show up with their 
signs at a rally. Just horrible.
  It is obvious to me that a goal of the new administration, whoever is 
sworn in this January, ought to look at whether it is time to change 
the rules, to change the formulas so that we no longer have an apparent 
policy in the United States of keeping both parents away from the 
children at the same time.
  Here is another quote, which I think is illuminating, and this quote 
comes from a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

[[Page H5556]]

  A lot of people don't know people who are on the Wisconsin Supreme 
Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is nominally nonpartisan, but 
nevertheless, races for the Supreme Court clearly have one person 
backed more by the Democrat Party and one backed more by the Republican 
Party.
  Recently in a case, and this was just dicta, one of the liberal 
judges, Jill Karofsky, wrote a concurring opinion in which she said, 
``The notion that marriage serves as the foundation of society is at 
best outdated, and at worst misogynistic.'' In other words, overtly 
anti-father.
  It is a scary quote because she kind of implies that marriage is 
already done. It is over with. The left has won. She can say that 
marriage is at worst misogynistic, anti-male.
  It is something I want the American people to think about. I want the 
people in Wisconsin to think about it. I want the journalists in 
Wisconsin to think about it.
  Is Justice Jill Karofsky right? Is it already the end of the American 
family, or can we fight and bring it back and make it the norm like it 
was 50 or 60 years ago?
  In any event, I think it is something that should be brought up and 
has not been brought up anywhere near enough.
  The third topic that I think we ought to discuss is the Biden 
administration's policy of giving preferences to one more ethnic group, 
something that nobody back home knows has happened. The reason they 
don't know it is happening is because it hasn't been covered in the 
press.
  The DEI effort, the idea of judging people by their ethnicity, 
judging people by their sex is something that has been around for over 
50 years now, but the Biden administration, I think, keeps trying to 
push it more to the fore. It is something else that ought to be talked 
about in this campaign.
  The Biden administration last year changed the policy, as a practical 
matter, to create preferences for people who come here from the Middle 
East or North Africa.
  Now, we know there are already other groups that if they apply for a 
government job, they may be given preferences.
  If they own a company and want to receive a government contract, they 
will get preferences over Americans of European descent.
  By the way, you also get preferences for jobs if you work for a 
company that does over $10,000 of business with the Federal Government 
each year.
  In any event, we are now adding people from Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and 
Syria to this list. We are adding people who come here from Gaza to 
this list.
  Is that a good idea? Do we think when people are fleeing Gaza with 
all their wonderful anti-Semitic ideas and coming to this country that 
they should also be given preferences?

  Apparently, I believe that is what will happen now unless somebody 
does something and prevents that from happening. It is something most 
Americans don't know about. It is something that should be talked 
about.
  The next thing that should be talked about, and I brought five issues 
here. Obviously, we are giving them to the chair but also anybody in 
the press corps, and that is as we look to hire new people to run this 
government in January, are we committed to the First Amendment, which 
should be obvious.
  In August, it came out that Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, was 
apparently threatened in some way or cajoled into keeping things off 
something, which presumably was supposed to be kind of a wide-open 
medium that you could pursue and find out what was going on in America 
today. Instead, the people in the current administration decided to 
weigh in and say there are certain ideas that Americans apparently 
shouldn't be able to know about.
  At the time, a lot of it was concerning COVID, and, of course, 
different people had different opinions on social distancing, on the 
treatments that people received when they went to the hospital, on the 
vaccines, on all these things.
  Apparently, the past government didn't feel that Americans could 
handle all the information, so like maybe a government in the Soviet 
Union or China, there were some things that they felt had to be removed 
from people's computers, and that is why they weighed in with Mark 
Zuckerberg.
  We know before that, there were people who weighed in, the same 
political party, because they felt information regarding Hunter Biden 
was not something that the Americans could handle on their own, so we 
had to remove it and keep Americans in the dark.
  Maybe that was significant enough, it changed who won the last 
election, but in any event, it is another example of people of 
importance in America who kind of view the First Amendment with 
contempt.
  I would like to know, going in for the next election, where the 
people running for public office stand on the First Amendment.

                              {time}  1345

  The final issue I would like to bring up which seems to be dropped 
is, in August when we were not in, like many other politicians, I rang 
doorbells in my district to see what was on people's minds.
  I ran across two grandmothers who had grandchildren who had tried to 
go down this transgender route. It was obviously very disturbing for 
both grandmothers. One of them only had one grandchild, and I could 
tell it broke her heart that her granddaughter, who she loved so much, 
had decided to go down the transgender path.
  This is obvious that we have far more of this than we had when I was 
a child. Most people who have what they call gender dysphoria will grow 
out of it. Unfortunately, we have a policy right now pushed by the 
Department of Education in which we have to, I would say, encourage or 
tell people that this is an acceptable way to behave.
  Right now, the Department of Education is threatening to withhold 
funds from school districts who don't, say, allow transgender guys into 
the girls' bathroom or such. In other words, this part of the culture 
is kind of, I believe, encouraging an increase in this sort of 
behavior.
  It is not something that affects many Americans, but if it affects 
Americans like the grandmothers I talked to, it is devastating. I would 
hope in the future that politicians who talk about this issue realize 
that when they, as President Biden is, talk about it like it is a very 
positive thing, the result is, I think you are going to have more and 
more people go down this path, and you are going to have more and more 
people who would have come out of it eventually stay in it.
  It is something else that should be talked about. Is the reason we 
have such a big increase in transgenderism because it was always there 
or is it because our culture is making it a more a permissible 
lifestyle and, as a result, encouraging children to go down this path?
  In any event, that is five issues that I wish the press would take up 
in October. I wish they would publish, as it comes out, the new all-
time record for people coming across the southern border. I wish they 
would focus on not only the excessive spending that leads to the 
inflation but the even more excessive spending that virtually every 
Democrat in this Chamber was prepared to vote for about three times 
more than what became the Inflation Reduction Act.
  I hope that going into the election the press weighs in, should the 
United States continue the current policy of greatly increasing Federal 
benefits if you don't have both a working man and woman at home. In 
other words, the policy of encouraging single parenthood at the expense 
of having two parents at home.
  I hope the press focuses a little bit in the next election on are we 
going to have people who will stand with the First Amendment or are we 
going to have people who like to lean on our social platforms and say 
that there are certain things that Americans shouldn't know and are we 
going to see whether we are going to use America's schools to continue 
to encourage the transgender lifestyle.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________