Build Back Better

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to use this time to speak for a half hour on a variety of issues, primarily the Build Back Better bill.

But first, I would like to address today National Apprenticeship Week. Apprenticeships are a very good way to begin your working career. Rather than working your way into debt as you go to school, you are making money while you go to school, and there is no better preparation for a job than doing the job itself.

Be it in construction, be it in manufacturing, be it in healthcare, there is a strong need in America for skills, and apprenticeship is a way to get those skills and ensure that you hit the ground running and get a good-paying job immediately.

I strongly encourage all Americans, particularly young Americans, who are looking for a job to look at apprenticeship and encourage administrators of secondary schools to present apprenticeships as options for young people.

Now I would like to address the Build Back Better bill. A lot has been written and talked about the Build Back Better bill from this very microphone, and a lot has been focused on the additional taxes that will be needed to pay for it and the overall level of spending resulting in more inflation.

All that is true, but I think the most dangerous thing about the bill is what the money is being spent for. I am going to address five areas in general tonight for the American public to remember.

Right now, I think the biggest problem in America deals with illegal immigration. The numbers are well known. In July, a year ago, 8,000 people came into this country. This July it was 105,000 people. This October we hit the all-time high number of people processed for any October at the southern border.

The drug gangs are making lots of money down there. Some people tell me the drug gangs are making more money bringing people in the country than they did selling drugs. Seven years ago, when I first got this job, 45,000 Americans a year were dying of illegal drug overdoses. We are now at 93,000, more than double.

When I first got here, we talked about the number of people dying of illegal drug overdoses approaching the number of soldiers who died in Vietnam. Now we are approaching twice the number of soldiers who died in Vietnam.

We talk about the humanitarian mess down there. In July, 15,000 minors were left alone and coming into the country. Last year we hit another all-time record, 557 deaths of people trying to get in the country, be it from dehydrating in the desert, drowning in the Rio Grande, or falling off the wall.

What are we doing with this crisis in this bill? What vision do they have for America? First of all, they are going to take about 7 million people who have snuck into the country illegally in the past and give them amnesty. In addition to the unfairness of having some people skip ahead of other people, that is an invitation to bring still more people into the country.

Secondly, they are going to make it more difficult to kick people out of the country. More parole for people with sex offenses, people with firearm offenses, and this parole is mandatory. It is not something that can be revoked at the discretion of DHS.

In this bill, as a further inducement to come here, we are going to give away free Pell grants, which is to say free college scholarships to people coming here illegally. Hard as it is to believe, while Americans are spending $20 thousand, $30 thousand, $40 thousand, $50,000 in debt for a college diploma, in the Build Back Better bill, we are going to give away free college to people who are here illegally.

Furthermore, in this bill, a bill spending trillions of dollars, about the only thing they are not spending more money on is the Border Patrol. We all know that as more children come here, the Border Patrol has to spend more time on paperwork caring for children, so they need more people at the border. But as the border is left open, the one thing the Democrat Party sadly feels is not a priority is more Border Patrol agents.

So again, to repeat, in the Build Back Better bill, 7 million more people given amnesty, requiring more parole for people who have committed serious crimes so that they are not kicked out of the country, and free Pell grants, which fits nicely with the free healthcare we give away as well.

I want to mention that free healthcare. The average American is sitting there worrying about their deductible, should we go to the doctor, should we not? What does the majority party want to do? Well, we have got to give illegals free healthcare. It is the only fair thing to do.

The second big problem I think in this country is what I will call a growing number of Americans adapting to the welfare lifestyle.

Beginning in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson--in my opinion, the worst President in this country until this time--started a massive welfare state, the result of which was causing people to work less and to make sure they didn't get married because it was hard to take advantage of the welfare system if you were married. In other words, the goal was to discourage marriage, discourage work.

Since that time, the number of people with particularly a father in the family has decreased considerably since the early sixties in response to the Great Society, which discouraged--gave financial inducements not to have a male in the family.

How does the Build Back Better bill deal with the American crisis of the breakdown of the family? Wherever you look, they are putting more money into these programs, the programs that in the past were created for people who didn't make much money and were created for people who weren't married to somebody making money: food share; low-income housing; Medicaid; daycare; earned income tax credit that you had to earn something to get, but if you began to make over $15,000 or $20,000, they took that away from you; TANF funds, cash to people also adopting that lifestyle.

So how does the majority party respond to the crisis of a welfare system that discourages work and discourages marriage? We have a larger earned income tax credit, which goes up, again, if you are not married to somebody making a decent income. We are building a lot more low- income housing.

Low-income housing sounds all very good, but I talked to a woman who administers low-income housing. I asked her where people are coming from when they get off the waiting list for low-income housing. Well, a lot of them were living with their parents. Okay. So we are going to take a parent and the child and give them their own apartment, as opposed to having them live with grandparents. Is that a good thing, to move out of mom's house? I don't think so.

We are increasing, or the Biden administration itself, before we get to the bill, increased the amount of food stamps you are getting. We are adding more money in Pell grants, which is, again, a situation if you are a middle-class family and you are working, you aren't eligible for Pell grants. But if you are adopting a certain lifestyle, you are eligible for free college.

So it seems wherever you look, this program is encouraging that lifestyle, which I think is unfortunate for America.

There are wonderful people who are parents in all sorts of situations, but undeniably in this country we are right now penalizing what I will call the old-fashioned family. And I will point out that it is something, as we started this session and Black Lives Matter weighed in strongly in the last election to who would win, Black Lives Matter itself, their founders, quoted Karl Marx, the fact that they did not believe in the traditional family.

When I look here, it seems that that is a motivating factor behind putting this bill together, and we are going to penalize the traditional family.

The third ideal that flows through the Build Back Better Act is to identify people by racial background. Whether you are talking about money for small businesses, money for teacher preparation, money for community restoration, faculty of colleges of medicine, equity in the Department of Agriculture, or behavioral health, wherever you look, it is not like the programs are for all Americans. The programs are designed for certain Americans.

I was reading some statements by Yuri Bezmenov, who was a Russian defector in the 1960s. At the time, he talked about how the Marxists planned to take over America. He said the majority of money spent in the United States was not spent on subversive or covert activities. It was spent openly to try to demoralize Americans to think that America was not a great country. A quote from him is that ``racial and ethnic interrelations is one of the most vulnerable areas for demoralization'' of Americans.

Now, one would think his observation as someone who had been around the world is that there is no better place to live than America. But right now, it seems as though the majority party is doing the work that the Soviets wanted to accomplish in the twenties. They want to tell everybody that we ought to have racial animus, that we ought to pit one group against another group.

When you look around the world, one of the reasons nations fail, nations based on elections, is that those elections become contests between ethnic groups.

I never felt Canada was quite as successful as America because, to a degree, their elections pitted the French speakers against the English speakers. You look at elections in the Middle East, and it is the Sunnis against the Shiites. You look at elections in Africa, and it is one tribe against another tribe.

In other words, when they go to the polls, they don't say what is the appropriate money to spend on national defense or what is our roads policy or what should be appropriate criminal justice policy or the length of jail sentences. No, in these countries that fail, the elections are a contest of one ethnic group against another.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the people who want America to fail would set up programs designed to benefit one group against the other.

We have seen this earlier this session when we had a program forgiving agriculture debts only for so-called people of color. We also saw it earlier this session when we had a program that ran out of money for restauranteurs, and the people at the bottom of the list were people who happened to be White.

A guy came up to me in my district who would have gotten, he claims, tens of thousands of dollars if he were of a different ethnic background. He wondered why he was left behind. Well, it is because we have a party here that likes to set one group against another group.

That is the third way or the third vision that the majority party has for America. They want to pit one group against the other. They want people to always view themselves rather than as an American. They want to view themselves as a Hispanic American or an Asian American or an African American.

The fourth way they want to change America in this bill, which also has not been talked about enough, is they want to provide universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. Not only that, they want to make sure that the preschools not be run by religious entities--kind of letting the cat out of the bag. They want to make sure that, insofar as the 3- and 4-year-olds were taught anything, it not be any religious values.

Again, in America, the raising of the children is supposed to be something done by the parents. The family is supposed to be preeminent in raising the children. Even in my lifetime, the kindergartners have gone from, at least in Wisconsin, half-day 5-year-old kindergarten to all-day 5-year-old kindergarten to half-day 4-year-old kindergarten.

We now are, in one fell swoop, having the Federal Government, which under the Constitution should have nothing to do with this whatsoever anyway, going all the way down to the government raising the 3- and 4- year-olds.

It is a fundamental change in how much influence the parents have on their children and should be resisted, not resisted for the cost, although the cost is a good reason to resist it, but resisted because it is contrary to the profamily values that our ancestors felt we would have.

The fifth thing that I would like to talk about in this bill is it is apparent the authors want a lot more government surveillance of what people are doing.

President Biden on his own recently proposed monitoring every $600 transfer. Eventually, he had to back off under public criticism. He is now at $10,000. But you know if he could get back down to 600 bucks, he would do it in a heartbeat.

Why would the government care if I cashed a $600 check? I can imagine in today's world why they would care. Maybe they want to monitor me. Maybe they want to see what type of church I am contributing money to. Maybe they want to see if I am purchasing a firearm. Maybe they want to see if I am giving money to a magazine or giving money to a political party, maybe a magazine espousing politically incorrect beliefs. Maybe they want to look at whether I give any money to a political party that may be out of favor in a few years.

I think it is appalling that anybody would think that it is up to the government to see exactly where I am spending my money. We all know it is going for only bad purposes.

But in this bill, there is another item that hasn't been talked about enough, and that is the majority party wants to hire another 85,000 IRS agents--85,000. I think that is bigger than the average NFL stadium. It is about one of the big college stadiums. I went to the University of Wisconsin. It is about the size of filling up Camp Randall, 85,000 agents.

Of course, what is the purpose of those agents? To go around and monitor people's tax returns, to poke around, look for receipts, make adjustments, make guesses to what your income actually should be. It is clearly a different sort of country if you have 85,000. I wouldn't bring this up if it was 1,000 new agents, but 85,000 new IRS agents.

It sounds like proportionately we are headed, again, toward more of a surveillance state, toward less of a free state. It is the vision, sadly, of the majority party.

I want to review them one more time. I hope the American public, when they look at this bill, does pay attention to the bottom line. There is going to be more inflation, higher costs on the heat bill, no question about it. But regardless of the amount of money, this is a document put together by people who want to encourage illegal immigration all the way down to giving free college to people who come here. It is a party that wants to increase welfare benefits, benefits that are conditioned upon not working too much and certainly not marrying a person with a respectable income. It is a party that wants to further entrench in the American psyche the idea that we have to have different programs based on sex, different programs based on race, and people ought to ask what you are going give me because I am from this group or what you are going to give me because I am a woman, rather than treating all Americans the same.

It is a bill that is put out with an ideal of the government raising the children instead of the parents, more responsibility for raising the children instead of the parents--again, something that I think would have stunned our forefathers.

Finally, it is a bill put together by people who want to hire a lot of new government employees to monitor what is going on.

I strongly encourage my colleagues to vote against the bill, and I strongly encourage the American public to familiarize themselves with not only the size of the cost of the bill but the degree to which we are fundamentally changing the way Americans live.

Now, I am going to speak one more time on an issue which I will try to highlight later this week or next week. We have a big COVID problem in this country, and obviously, a lot of money is being spent on vaccines and a lot of money is going to educating people.

It is my opinion that not enough attention has been paid to what we can do to cure COVID if you get COVID, be it vaccinated or unvaccinated.

Months, maybe even a year ago now, some Israeli researchers discovered that fenofibrate, a generic drug that has been used to treat high cholesterol, has tremendous potential success in curing COVID.

More recently, they found 15 people who not only had had COVID but had pneumonia and were on oxygen. I would say if somebody had COVID with pneumonia and was on oxygen, they were in bad shape. They gave them this generic drug, which was freely used for over 40 years in this country for high cholesterol, and 14 of the 15 patients were out of the hospital in 4 days. The other guy was out in 2 weeks. In other words, it sounds like a cure.

I have been trying to get the CDC to push--they put a little money into it--but push more money into this program for research to see whether or not we would have a cure. I have been told by the researchers to this day that the CDC would try a little bit harder, and there is a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania looking into this. But if you really want to say it is successful, you want to find at least 700 subjects or patients. It is hard to find that many people without help from the CDC, particularly if you don't have the big money of the drug companies behind you.

Right now, our researcher at the University of Pennsylvania has about 350 people. He likes to believe that, by the end of March, he will be able to make a definitive statement that fenofibrate would be able to cure COVID for under 50 cents a day.

Wouldn't that be wonderful. And not only does it cure COVID, but if you get COVID it will be much less serious. And right now, long-term COVID, even if you are cured, can result in long-term health problems otherwise.

I strongly encourage my colleagues to encourage the Center for Disease Control to look at COVID, see what they can do about coming up with another 300 or 400 people for a definitive study and then rush--if the study winds up as well as we think it will--rush out and educate these doctors to prescribe it because it is entirely possible it will greatly reduce the number of people with long-term COVID and the number of people dying.

Again, if anybody at the CDC is listening, I hope you take advantage of this tip. And otherwise, me and my colleagues will sign a letter including a little more action from the CDC, because if we found a cure for COVID we wouldn't have to worry about all the other controversial issues that are so damaging to our country and taking away our freedoms.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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