Focusing on Priority Issues

Floor Speech

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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