[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 62 (Monday, April 7, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H1445-H1447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr.
Grothman of Wisconsin was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of
the majority leader.)
Mr. GROTHMAN. After returning from our districts, Mr. Speaker, it is
time to bring to the Chair's attention a variety of issues which we
have come across over the weekend and issues that the minority party
has brought up.
The first issue I bring up is that regarding DEI. DEI or Affirmative
Action has been a big part of America's landscape over the last 60
years, and it is not something that is going to go away overnight.
President Trump can do what he can to wipe out this odious
philosophy, but nevertheless it is important for us to educate the
young people in this country as to why it is so odious.
It is based on the premise that what you accomplish in this country
or what you should be given in this country is based on your ancestry
or your gender.
It was based on the idea I think largely thought up by a guy by the
name of Herbert Marcuse in the early 1970s that we can destroy America
by dividing it by ethnic group or dividing it by gender. He was a
genuine Communist sort of person.
Prior to this time, people who wanted to destroy this country thought
they could divide it by income, and they thought they could make
everybody very mad and jealous of very successful people and tear down
America by doing that.
They tried in the 1960s. There were bombings, and there were anti-
Vietnam protests, but they failed to bring down America because
Americans themselves are hardworking, and they realized the middle-
class lifestyle in America would be like a wildly wealthy lifestyle
everywhere else in the world.
{time} 1930
They failed. They thought: Let's educate our so-called minority
people that America is a horrible country and that you are being held
down because you are not a White male. President Biden made it clear
that he was somewhat hostile to White males.
The first thing we can do to prove that it is not true and every
child ought to know it so they aren't corrupted by these DEI
professionals that our colleges and universities are spitting out or
this horrible ideology our young people are educated into is--as I was
reminded again going back to my district, I met with a group of
Ahmadiyya Muslims from Pakistan. Here is a group that didn't come from
Europe. They aren't Christian, but nevertheless, they have a mosque in
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in my district, and they are obviously succeeding
very well. They have strong families. They have a good work ethic. If
America were Eurocentric, as they say, they would not be so successful.
I have also seen the same thing with Hmong in my district. I have a
substantial Hmong population from Laos. These people came to America
and
[[Page H1446]]
didn't even know English when they were children. Nevertheless, they
have come here, and now they all own houses. Their children are doing
well. Their families are strong. Again, this is despite the fact that
they are not of European descent.
Indeed, if you look at statistics that are put out there by the
Census Bureau, if you look at different ethnic groups from around the
globe, you find easily the most successful group is people who came
here from India, another group that didn't even necessarily know
English when they got here. Indian Americans make far more income than
the average American. Indeed, they make almost twice the income as the
average European American.
Other groups that do tremendously well are the Taiwanese, the
Filipinos, the Cubans, people who come here from the West Indies. They
are all doing far better than the native born, despite the fact that
they are not of European heritage.
If anybody knows anybody who has been corrupted by this wicked
ideology that implies, in America, you can't succeed unless you are a
White European, look at the facts. Look how people come here and
succeed again and again. I would hope you would realize by looking at
these facts that you should throw the DEI ideology being taught to our
college kids, and in some cases taught to our high school and middle
school kids, in the garbage.
Remember a communist by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who thought up
this stuff in the seventies and eighties. Remember, the reason they
adopted the DEI ideology is because they wanted to destroy America.
They wanted to set people from one continent against another continent.
Remember the statistics of how well people do here and make sure that
our next generation is not polluted by this because we have way too
many people floating around this country who got a certificate in DEI
or a major in DEI, and they are up to no good.
Another thing I want to mention here is with regard to immigration.
President Trump is trying to enforce the law. I think one of the
difficult problems he has dealt with is we just got done with a
President who did all he could to ignore our immigration laws. As a
result, we took in about 10 million people here in the last 4 years,
and that is not something that we should have done.
What can we tell the people who feel we are being unnecessarily
cruel? Every year in this country, about 850,000 people are
naturalized. They are sworn in to become American citizens. I like to
show up at these ceremonies. They have them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I
try to show up at one or two a year. It is kind of thrilling to watch
people from all over the globe--a lot of them have good jobs; a lot of
them already have their own businesses--as they are sworn in as
American citizens.
When you take it in 3-year increments--there is always one year or
other years as an outlier. If you look at it in 3-year increments, that
850,000 over the last 3 years is the most that we have taken in, as far
as I can tell, in this country's history.
When I was growing up, the number of naturalized people every year
was about 200,000. We are now over four times that amount.
Nevertheless, there are people who are going to go out there to try to
divide us who say that we are not letting people come here from abroad,
that we are being cruel.
Mr. Speaker, 850,000 people. That is something to remember. That is
before you get all the people coming here on work visas, all the people
coming here on tourist visas, and all the people coming here on student
visas.
One just has to look around and realize that the idea that we are
being cruel to people who came here across our southern border is
ridiculous. Many people are coming here. Obviously, if we are going to
enforce the law, we have to remove the people who came here by
pretending they needed asylum and didn't. Then, there are going to be
millions of people, and the same people who encouraged them to come
here, knowing full well they were breaking the law or having to lie
about needing asylum to come here, the people who caused the mess are
going to say it is horrible to remove these people.
Our President Trump is going to have to step up to the plate and undo
the damage done by the last administration, and he is going to remove
many, many of these people. One has to remember, the reason he is
removing them is because the prior administration, with a lot of
encouragement from people on the other side of the aisle, were bringing
people here who were coming here on false pretenses.
The next issue we have to look at is one that I do hope is included
in Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill. This is, I think, the biggest
crisis facing America today. John Adams said our country is built for a
moral, God-fearing country. In a free country, families have to be
strong and self-reliant.
Beginning in the 1960s, in this country, we had a massive increase in
subsidies, which ignored a family with a mother and father at home.
In the 1950s, about 4 percent of the children born in this country
were born without a mother and a father at home. Within the next 30
years, after Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, that 4 percent
increased to over 40 percent. Many other problems came with it.
Why did that happen? It happened because, right now, we have
approximately 90 programs that you are not eligible for if you are not
in poverty. In other words, for a mother or a father at home making
$40,000, $50,000 a year, they would not get these programs. These
programs are familiar to all of us: earned income tax credit; what I
think is the most damaging, the low-income housing programs; the
healthcare programs; the food stamp programs; the Pell grants. There is
program after program you get, but you would lose these programs if you
had both parents in a home.
Nobody takes advantage of all 90 programs, but I think it is probably
not unusual to have people take advantage of 6 or 7 programs. Then, it
would not be unusual for people who have a mother and father at home to
be penalized over $20,000 a year if they get married.
We have to look at these programs, and frequently, these programs
materially put a married couple at a disadvantage.
We have all heard stories of Food Share. If you talk to people at the
local convenience store, talk to people at the local grocery store,
people are taking advantage of these programs. They may be able to buy
food items that the person who is working behind the counter can't
afford.
We know when it comes to housing that there is section 42 tax credit
housing, which is a screwed up program for many reasons. It is aimed at
lower income people. The developers are incentivized to make these
projects as nice as possible.
I had a staffer who got married in Wisconsin. They said, ``Glenn, my
husband and I are looking for a place to live after we get married, and
the nicest places are all low-income housing.'' That doesn't seem to
make any sense, unless you look at it again as certain people are out
there trying to destroy the nuclear family and trying to discourage
people from entering into that sort of relationship.
The same thing is true of healthcare. We need healthcare for
everyone, but the same thing is true of healthcare. You don't have the
big deductibles that you have when people get their healthcare from
working in the private sector. You might have a $10,000 or $15,000
deductible. You don't get a deductible like that if you are on the
government plan.
The same thing is true with Pell grants. A woman came up to me and
said, ``My husband and I got married. We don't have enough money to
help our daughter go through college, so she had to take out a lot of
student loans. My sibling is not working, and her daughter got free
grants from the government, grants she wouldn't have gotten if she was
married.'' Again, is that a good thing? I am not sure it is.
Again and again, in program after program, we discourage the nuclear
family. That is why we have gone from a 4 percent rate of kids born
without a mother and father at home to 40 percent. It was like it was
by design, like somebody wanted to destroy the nuclear family.
It is important to remember that we may individually not know these
people, but there have always been people who wanted to destroy the
nuclear family and feel that is the key to bringing down America.
Certainly, the Marxists wanted to destroy the nuclear
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family. Until they took it off their website, a more recent group,
Black Lives Matter, was overtly antifamily. The feminist extremists in
the sixties--Kate Millett being the prominent one; you can call her the
mother of women's studies--were very anti-nuclear family.
These anti-nuclear family people got the upper hand, and that is why
we have gone from about 4 percent to over 40 percent.
I hope, as the people in this body put together their great big,
beautiful bill, that we remember that a lot of the programs in our
current budget are programs designed to destroy the nuclear family.
I have two other quick comments. One is with regard to transgender
and local schools. A lot of people have talked about men in women's
sports, and I don't even think that is the biggest scandal. I think the
biggest scandal is that we are educating our young people to adopt a
transgender lifestyle.
In Europe, when they backed off on pushing this lifestyle, the
lifestyle not exclusively but largely disappeared. In other words, we
have made it cool by what they do in Hollywood promoting this
lifestyle. Sadly, the schools are promoting this lifestyle.
I will mention, again, my own anecdotes. When I was campaigning last
year, I ran into a couple of grandmothers whose grandchildren were
going down this transgender route, and it broke their hearts. They
wondered why this had to happen because it wasn't something they saw
when they were children. It happened because our education system and
our popular culture promote this lifestyle.
It is a good thing if President Trump tries to get this stuff out of
our institutes of public instruction.
I think it is really too bad if people feel it is cool to adopt this
lifestyle. It is something for us to remember, and hopefully, we will
be having hearings on this topic as we delve into whether people would
adopt this lifestyle in the first place if there weren't so many
powerful special interests that encouraged people to adopt this
lifestyle.
{time} 1945
Mr. Speaker, my final point, when we come to our big, beautiful bill,
a lot of it is going to have to do with taxes. I stand with President
Trump on some of his items here that he has brought up in the past and
some of them are the reasons why I like him.
President Trump is not afraid to stand up to the special interests
that seem to be so persuasive in this Chamber.
First of all, even though a lot of the money is already out the door,
President Trump came up against the CHIPS bill. The CHIPS bill was a
public-private partnership, I guess we should call it. Whenever you
hear about a public-private partnership, I think you have to hold onto
your wallet, because that means a private-sector group wants some
government money.
The CHIPS bill is to encourage more semiconductor manufacturing in
the United States. I think we have to encourage more semiconductor
manufacturing, but it costs about $280 billion. That is about $700 for
every man, woman, and child in the country.
Does anybody really believe that the Federal Government should be
grabbing $700 from everybody just to promote one industry? I think we
could promote that industry with a much smaller amount if we deal with
some exemptions from manufacturing I am going to talk about in a
second. That would be another way to bring more semiconductor
manufacturing into this country.
I strongly believe, along with President Trump, that a subsidy of
$700 per person in this country for the semiconductor industry is
unnecessary.
The next thing I will bring up is the carried interest treatment for
hedge fund managers. Under the carried interest loophole, you might
call it, people whose primary income is derived from being entitled to
some of the money they make for their investors is taxed at capital
gains rates rather than regular rates.
In other words, people who are investing other people's money and
making, frequently, millions of dollars a year are taxed at a much
lower rate than people who are welders, people who are nurses, or
people who make their money any other way.
President Trump came out against the carried interest loophole when
he ran for President in 2016. He wasn't able to get rid of it at that
time. This time, I hope that our Committee on Ways and Means, together
with President Trump, stops taxing these wildly wealthy people at a
lower tax rate than what the average guy or woman is making in this
country. That is another good thing to do.
The final tax provision that I point out is President Trump has
floated the idea of having a lower tax rate for manufacturing than
other industries. I applaud him for that.
To be a great country, you have to make things. You are not a wealthy
country because you have a lot of law firms. You are not a wealthy
country because you have a lot of advertising agencies. You are a
wealthy country because you make things. Our manufacturers, unlike some
of these other industries, have to compete against companies abroad.
Mr. Speaker, when these big multinational corporations have to decide
if they are going to set up shop in Germany or Korea or Brazil or India
or wherever, we want it to be favorable taxwise to set up shop in the
United States. Therefore, I do believe that, when the final tax rates
are laid out by the Committee on Ways and Means, I would like to see
lower rates for manufacturers who, after all, are responsible for
producing the wealth in this country.
It is something I have pursued in my own personal career. We have got
a nice low tax rate for Wisconsin manufacturers, but we would like to
see a lower rate for manufacturers in the United States than these
other countries.
If we are going to be a great country, not only do we need stronger
families and to stop penalizing these families, but we have to stop
educating our poor, young people that we are a racist country. To be a
great country, we need a strong manufacturing base. We want it to be
preferable to manufacture stuff in the United States than in Europe or
Asia or South America. The way to do that is a lower tax rate for
manufactured items.
I thank the chair for paying rapt attention to all the comments I
have made here tonight. I hope my colleagues, as they put together the
big, beautiful bill, take them to heart, stop penalizing the nuclear
family, start treating manufacturing especially the way it should be,
and crack down on special tax provisions that benefit the very wealthy.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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