The Press Corps

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, President Biden and the progressives frequently talk about equity and prejudice, and they think we have a lot of discrimination in this country and that some people are treated better than others. I don't think that is a problem. I think his remarks are solely designed to tear down America and create resentments.

I look at my own district of people of non-European descent, and whether I look at the Hmong from Laos or Sikhs from India, I see people who come here and grew up in lands in which their native tongue wasn't even English, mostly their religion was not Christianity, and they are thriving in America.

But there is one group in the United States in general and Joe Biden in particular, if you look at his Build Back Better bill, Madam Speaker, seems to hate overtly, and there is discrimination against this group: married couples with children.

Karl Marx was, of course, against the nuclear family because it was self-supporting and perhaps educated the children in morals and values that may be different from what the government wants. He wanted the government to raise the children.

Black Lives Matter, which played a central role in retaining the majority for the Democrats last November, had on its website that its goal was to get rid of the Western-prescribed nuclear family until it was taken down.

By the way, that is one of the most dishonest statements ever. Families with mom, dad, and kids are from all around the world. They are from Asia, from South America, and from Africa. The idea that an old-fashioned nuclear family is only European is preposterous, but nevertheless, that is what they say.

But I get it. There are people in this world who don't want the father supporting the family.

Now, let's look at what is going on in the Build Back Better bill. Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation has done a fine analysis of the effect of Build Back Better on nuclear families. Frequently, welfare programs disincentivize work and disincentivize marriage.

How they do it is obvious. If you work harder, you don't get those benefits, be it low-income housing, be it SNAP, be it Medicaid. The harder you work, they begin to take away benefits.

Furthermore, these programs discourage marriage because if a mother-- usually the mother--marries a man who has a decent income, then she is no longer considered in poverty. And, again, all the programs--the daycare, the earned income tax credit, and the SNAP--disappear.

This is why I call what happens in the Build Back Better bill a part of the war on marriage. This began with Lyndon Johnson--for my money, the worst President this country has ever had, and not for the way he conducted the Vietnam war. I am old enough to remember when you talked about Lyndon Johnson, that was the horrible thing you said--but for what developed into a war on marriage.

It is hard to believe, but when they started the welfare system in the 1960s, only 7 percent of children were born out of wedlock. That number is now 40 percent. It has stayed pretty static since the 1990s, but it is clear in the Build Back Better bill that President Biden is trying to push that number up above 40 percent.

I recently heard of a young girl being advised by her mother to get pregnant, not to get pregnant and get married, but to get pregnant because it would open up a variety of government benefits, and mom felt this was the way to go through life.

Build Back Better--and it depends which benefits we are looking at-- could increase the number of benefits, when put on everything else, to up to a $14,000 penalty for getting married. In other words, we do what we can to discourage marriage. SNAP, earned income tax credit, childcare, and low-income housing, as well as more narrowly tailored programs such as Pell grants or TANF, all carry marriage penalties with themselves.

That is exactly what will happen if people come off the waiting list for the generous increases in low-income housing and take the benefit of that low-income housing together with an increase in the earned income tax credit and an increase in the SNAP.

Madam Speaker, you can wind up getting $11,000 more for making this decision. Just like Karl Marx wanted: get the man out of the household.

I know so much of the focus of the Build Back Better bill is just on the spending package and the effect it will have on inflation, and that is true. People like to focus on giving free college to illegal immigrants, which still amazes me, and that is bad, too. But I really think if the bill were to pass, what it will be remembered for is a big shot in the arm toward the type of people who do not want an old- fashioned nuclear family.

It is something that I haven't heard the press cover. Robert Rector's Heritage Foundation's study is something that we will make public within the next 2 or 3 days. When it is made public, I hope our press corps pays a little bit of attention to the shift that this bill will have toward making it more economically advantageous to not have two parents in the household.

The next topic that I would like to address concerns the issue in the news involving Ukraine. I am not personally the most hawkish Member here regarding Ukraine, but what amazes me about this conflict is that more is not written about the Holodomor. I have talked to people in this building, talked to young people, and they don't even know what the Holodomor is.

In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin, the Communist dictator of the Soviet Union, had a problem in Ukraine. Some of the people in Ukraine wanted to go back and be an independent country, which it was for a while a few years before that. Some of the people in Ukraine, particularly the farmers, which were called kulaks, didn't like the idea of giving up their land and going to work for the government. Of course, one of the things that Communists like is they want everybody working for the government because they want to have total control over everybody.

I am sure the problem in Ukraine in the early thirties is similar to what we have in Wisconsin. We have a lot of small dairy farmers. They own their own land and their own business, and they wouldn't take kindly to the idea of a Marxist government coming over and saying: This is no longer your land. These are no longer your cows. You are working for us, the government.

So the way Joseph Stalin decided to deal with it is he decided to starve out the people in Ukraine. He decided to put troops around Ukraine so you couldn't escape. And he decided to take the crops and take the produce and put soldiers guarding it, and people began to starve to death.

To this day, we don't have an exact figure in the early thirties of how many people starved to death in Ukraine because of decisions made by Joseph Stalin. When you look online, Madam Speaker, you get numbers from about 4 million on the low side to 15 million on the high side. I am no expert. I would guess it is more like 4 or 5 million. But 4 or 5 million people starving to death is something every American schoolchild ought to be talking about. And when there is a possible conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it is something that the history channels and that the news stations ought to be talking about a whole lot.

Instead, when I walk around here and talk to staffers or talk to all the other people who help us around here, again and again, I find people who don't even know that 4 to 5 million Ukrainians starved to death in the early thirties.

One of the interesting things about this is that efforts were made to hide this almost immediately. The Soviet Union itself banned discussion of all the people who starved to death in Ukraine.

It kind of reminds me of certain people in the United States who don't like everything to appear online and like to take things down so things that are inconvenient for the people in charge are not publicized.

One of the things that everybody should know about--and I once talked to a New York Times reporter who himself didn't know about it--is that a guy by the name of Walter Duranty who worked for The New York Times was given a Pulitzer Prize as he sat over there and knew very well that this starvation was going on but didn't report it. He probably didn't report it because the cool kids from the liberal media like to think wonderful things about the Soviet Union. In a private letter, he said that the suffering is inflicted with a noble purpose.

So, that is what the readers of The New York Times were getting back in the early thirties, and that man was given a Pulitzer Prize. I might be wrong, but I don't think The New York Times has given it back.

Isn't it amazing that an American newspaper would be so horrible that if one of their reporters knew that millions of people were starving-- there is a letter that he wrote at the time in which he guessed it could be as high as 10 million people were starving. But because the Soviet Union was the darling of the leftist intellectuals, apparently, he didn't like to report it for the people back home. And to this day, I believe, The New York Times has yet to apologize or get rid of their Pulitzer.

In any event, as long as Ukraine is in the news, I would hope that American schoolteachers of social studies would begin to educate the American people about the 4 or 5 or 7 or 10 million people who starved to death in the early thirties. After all, unless you know about that, Madam Speaker, you don't know about the reason for the animosity--or at least one of the reasons for the animosity--between the Ukrainians and the Russians.

You don't know why people should be concerned when a Senator from Connecticut goes off and attends an anniversary ceremony for the U.S. Communist Party and is just let off the hook. You don't know why people like me are a little bit concerned when the founders of Black Lives Matter were avowed Marxists. Unless you know about what happened in Ukraine and communism in general, Madam Speaker, you don't know why so many people fought and died in Korea and Vietnam.

Of course, the Holodomor is only one of the things that every American schoolchild should know about. There were plenty of other mass massacres from the Soviet Union. There were a couple of massacres in Red China. We have the horrible taking away of freedoms in Cuba or Venezuela. We talk about the 1 to 2 million people who were murdered in Cambodia.

These are things that every American schoolchild should know because, as I said, right now, we have people kind of in this building and kind of in academia in America who I don't think really have a problem with Marxism. They think it is kind of a cool thing to flirt with.

I do hope that our news stations and our educational institutions at least now do a little to educate the American public on the millions of people who died in Ukraine.

There are two other issues to deal with today. I will follow up a little bit on what my colleagues said before because that is arguably the one area which--there are many areas--but on which the Biden administration is permanently damaging America.

We recently got the numbers of people who came in this country in December. It took a while to get them. The total, including what they call got-aways, is about 90,000 people who didn't go through appropriate channels, people whom we sometimes refer to as illegal immigrants, 90,000 in December. The December before, it was a little over 20,000. So we have gone up from 20,000 to 90,000 in 1 year.

I guess it is another thing that the press isn't really talking about like it should. I guess the COVID and the inability to get monoclonal antibodies out to people, which isn't talked about enough either, but that is something else we talk about. We can talk about Ukraine, and meanwhile, we aren't paying attention to just 1 more month in which the number of people coming here has shot up from 20,000 to 90,000.

As my colleagues just pointed out, not only is that people coming across, when you have an open border, we recently hit an all-time record of 100,000 Americans dying of illegal drug overdoses in 1 year-- 100,000.

When I got this job, it was 45,000, and it was a scandal. Everybody in this House was supposed to have a plan to deal with the 45,000 people who died every year of illegal drug overdoses. Well, Madam Speaker, in 7 years, it has gone up to 100,000. The biggest problem is fentanyl, and 100 percent of the fentanyl, I am told, is coming over the southern border.

But for some reason, our comatose press corps is not asking politicians, including the President, do you care?

I mentioned the Vietnam war and the Korean war a second ago. When we talk about 100,000 people dying in 1 year, that is about as many American troops who died in Korea and Vietnam together. Every year people are dying, and all the heartbreak that that causes, we don't care anymore. Or at least our press corps or the people who determine what is on people's minds aren't caring anymore. If it was one of your loved ones who died you would care.

So, I beg the American public and the comatose press corps to publicize the fact that we are now having 4\1/2\ times as many people a month come here as when Joe Biden took office and publicize the fact that 100,000 Americans are dying every year of illegal drug overdoses, largely fentanyl, which is frequently given to people who don't even know they have it.

Now, we are going to address one final issue that has not received enough attention with regard to the Build Back Better bill.

I will beg the Chair and anybody else who is listening to pay attention to this. The Build Back Better was a bill--one of these thousands, or at least well over 1,000-page bills--and to be honest, whenever you pass one of these massive bills up here, people who vote for it don't know all that is in it. It is impossible to know all that is in it.

And I have talked to people about this provision that is in it and, quite frankly, most people don't know what is in it, to a certain extent, because there are sexier issues.

But in Joe Biden's bill, we are giving grants designed, if they are accepted, to phase out 14(c) certificates. The listeners out there may or may not be familiar with work centers, or what used to be called sheltered workshops or CRPs, which are places--they do a lot of packaging in my district--places where people who have different abilities, sometimes are paid under minimum wage to do light manufacturing or packaging.

It always is enjoyable for me to tour these facilities because you deal with people who, I would think, have been dealt a tough lot in life, and they are so overwhelmingly happy to have a job like everybody else; to have a job like their siblings where they go to work.

And maybe, because of their different talents they are making $5 or $6 an hour. But they are getting other governmental assistance, and they are very proud every day to go to work and get a paycheck where they can buy some clothes for themselves, where they can buy gifts for their relatives. It is all so wonderful, and now they are under attack.

There are two philosophical reasons, to give the other side its due, for shutting down the work centers and saying these people shouldn't be able to work there anymore.

Some people feel that nobody should be able to work for minimum wage, and if you don't like the minimum wage of $7.50, you sure don't want people--or you claim you don't want people--working for $4 or $5 an hour. But again, these folks are getting other governmental benefits. It is not all they are living on.

What you do when you get rid of 14(c) certificates, which is what you need to work for under minimum wage, you are telling these folks that you won't work at all.

Secondly, there are people who don't like the fact that they feel these people are working in a segregated setting; in other words, they are working with other people with similar abilities to themselves.

It is my experience, having toured or taken dozens of tours in places like this, that--and you can ask them as well--they are very happy to be working in these facilities. There are many people working in these facilities who have abilities similar to people in other facilities. And the people who work in these facilities, I think, like them so much because it is a chance to find lifelong friends.

There was a time when people with different abilities had to stay at home and watch TV and just get to know their family members. But these jobs allow people to have--because frequently the turnover is not that great--they make friends who they will have for 30 or 40 years.

It breaks my heart that there are people who think that we are going to shut these down because people will be so much better if they work in a facility without anybody with different abilities, and it will be so much better. We must be taking advantage of these people if somebody is making $5 an hour.

I mean, I deal with the people who work in these facilities, including management. I don't think anybody is getting rich. They are probably, most of them, making a lot less money than a Congressman. But instead, they have to put up with these radicals--I will call them-- telling them that they are taking advantage of people because they are being paid 4 bucks an hour, 5 bucks an hour.

So, in any event, I am going to ask people who care about people with different abilities; whether you have a relative in this position; whether you have a child in this position; whether you, yourself work in a work center, please contact your Congressman and say, don't shut down these facilities.

It is what the life of so many of these folks is built around, and it would be crushing if you would try to just send them home or maybe find a business that will take them in for 3 or 4 hours a week, instead of 34 hours a week.

It would be crushing for these people if they lost the ability to work at the work centers or the CRPs.

So I beg the majority party, you are in charge, that if you do get something through on that Build Back Better bill, that this provision which is the end of the work centers is not in it.

Now, I would like to thank you for staying late and listening to my additional analysis.

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

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