Federal Budget

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, there are several things that we ought to be commenting on here.

Earlier this week, the House passed the Senate companion to my legislation, the Congressional Budget Office Data Access Act. This important piece of legislation will improve the ability of the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, to carry out its responsibilities to the legislative branch and, by extension, to the American people.

Under current law, the Budget Act authorized the CBO to collect information and data directly from Federal agencies. This data is critical as it allows the CBO to perform accurate and timely analysis and propose legislation, including calculating the cost of bills and assessing their long-term fiscal impact on our Federal budget.

CBO's role in providing this budgetary and economic analysis is fundamental to informed decisionmaking in Congress, particularly as we tackle the challenges of fiscal discipline and responsible spending that the Congressman spoke about from this dais about one-half hour ago.

However, despite the statutory authorization for CBO to access agency data, we have seen far too many instances were Federal agencies delay or restrict the CBO's access to the information necessary to perform its duties. Such delays and limitations can significantly hamper the CBO's ability to produce accurate cost estimates or deliver reports in a timely manner.

This results in inefficient legislative processes and, ultimately worse, undermines our ability to make well-informed decisions for the American public.

One of the primary reasons that agencies limit or delay provision of data to the CBO is the Privacy Act, which governs how agencies manage and share personal data. Currently the Privacy Act represents a significant obstacle for the CBO, even though it is already authorized to handle the same data under stringent confidentiality requirements.

The CBO Data Access Act addresses the problem by granting the CBO the same Privacy Act exemptions already extended to other legislative branch entities such as the Government Accountability Office and Congress itself.

Let me emphasize: this bill does not diminish the protections in place for sensitive information. CBO will remain subject to the same rigorous confidentiality standards as the agencies providing the data.

By extending this exemption, we are simply ensuring that the CBO's authority is brought in line with that of other legislative branch entries and that it has the data access it needs to continue providing high-quality, independent, nonpartisan analysis to Congress.

Furthermore, the need for the CBO to have timely access to data is especially pressing in today's legislative environment.

Congress is tasked with evaluating the budgetary impact of increasingly complex policies, whether it be in healthcare, infrastructure, national defense, or tax reform. These areas require detailed analysis, and without access to accurate, comprehensive, and timely data from other Federal agencies, the CBO could not fulfill its role.

Madam Speaker, I am proud to have introduced the House version of the CBO Data Access Act along with my colleague, Representative Mfume. I would also like to thank Senators Peters and Collins for their work on this legislation. This bicameral and bipartisan effort demonstrates the shared recognition across party lines of the importance of ensuring the CBO has the tools it needs to provide Congress with the best data available. The Southern Border

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to discuss a few of the issues that the press should be covering in the next 6 weeks leading up to the election but probably will not.

The first one, one more time, is the border. We are waiting right now for the results to come in from the number of people who have crossed the border in August.

However, we already know, despite what we hear from other people, that we have an all-time record number of people crossing into the southwest border in the first 11 months of the year compared to any year previously. That is 2.7 million people in 11 months.

This is a dramatic increase not only over past years but over prior administrations.

Before COVID, it was not unusual under the Trump administration to have 11,000 people cross the border, that is the difference between 11,000 and what worked its way up to 350,000. We had 243,000 this February, and even after the Biden administration weighed in and are bragging about something they finally did as we headed into the election, we were still at 154,000 in August, way more than what we saw, say, in a month in 2020 before COVID of 11,000. So we are already in the 15-times increase.

The cost of this is, of course, monetarily high, although that is not the major concern, but whether it is paying for schools, paying for medical treatment, or paying for housing for people who right now do not have a job to pay for themselves is huge.

At a time when the budget is so wildly out of whack and we are going so wildly, deeply into debt, the idea of having such a huge cost put upon us is intolerable.

Not only that, this open-borders policy which continues is resulting in the loss of life of about 100,000 people every year from fentanyl. That is before we get into the number of people who died crossing the border, be it drowning in the Rio Grande, drowning in the Pacific Ocean, or dehydrating in the Arizona desert, and before we talk about the huge number of sexual assaults that are taking place on women who try to cross the southern border because the southern border today is controlled by the brutal Mexican drug cartels.

We had a hearing on this topic earlier today, and some members of the Democratic Party, and sometimes they confuse the public on this, wonder what other way, why don't we solve the problem and find a way to let these people come in the country?

What they are not telling you, Madam Speaker, is every year in this country, 850,000 people approximately are sworn in as new American citizens, 850,000. Historically, if you break it down into 3-year increments, and it goes up and down by year, but if you break it down into 3-year increments, that is right now at the all-time high. Nobody should get confused and think there is no way to come into this country legally or no way to become a citizen legally. Every year 850,000 people find a way to come into this country legally.

This dwarfs, by the way, the number of people who are coming here, say, in the 1950s or 1960s, when I was growing up. We are doing more than our share of allowing people to come into our country.

I encourage the press to dig into these numbers, to publicize the new annual number that is going to be released sometime in September. I hope we also do a good job of publicizing the huge number of people who are dying because of drugs at the border.

I think one way for the American people to understand it is that, every year in this country, about twice as many people die from illegal drugs as died in 12 years in Vietnam. If you are like me and can remember the Vietnam war, you remember all the protests, all the coverage in Newsweek and Time magazine about the huge number of Americans dying there, every year in this country, twice as many people die of illegal drug abuse as died in 12 years in Vietnam.

By the way, when I talk about this, the number of people crossing the border, I should remind Americans that our enemies--and we always pass a large defense budget here and prepare for a military war--Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian President in the early 1960s and late 1950s, said that he was going to take over and conquer America. He still, I think, spoke for his successors as being a Socialist leader in the world at that time.

I mention that because I think there are several ways in which we can lose our country that does not involve being attacked by the military, and one of those is at the border.

Obviously new people are coming here who do not necessarily understand our Constitution, have bought into our culture. It is the reason why we are generous and let more people here, but we cannot let unlimited people here. That would be the end of the United States as we know it.

The second way that I think our enemies are able to cause the United States to collapse is the crisis of the family. In the middle 1960s, there were--I believe it is the 1960s, I don't think the 1950s--about 5 percent of the births in the country were to a woman who did not have a husband at home.

That slowly worked its way up to 40 percent after what, in my opinion, was the worst President in this country's history, Lyndon Johnson, started the Great Society in which he bribed women to have children out of wedlock and gave them things, some very costly, provided they didn't marry a man with a job.

You can go through many programs. There are about 78 programs that are handed out with a significant marriage penalty. In other words, it is very difficult to get it if a woman is married to a guy with an income, easy to get if she does not have much of an income--be it low- income housing, be it SNAP, be it the earned-income tax credit, be it the WIC, be it the SSDI, be it the Medicaid program, be it the Pell grants, be it the daycare. You can easily get hypotheticals, and it varies from person to person, of up to $30,000 a year in bribes not to get married.

This, of course, is the dream of the hard left. For whatever reason, Marxism holds a sway over a lot of people in academia. This is something the Marxists would want. The breakdown of the American family is something that the feminists have wanted, particularly in the 1960s. It is something that Angela Davis, who was a large Black militant, wanted. It is something that the Marxists who founded Black Lives Matter wanted.

They wanted to break down what they refer to as the Western- prescribed nuclear family. Of course, we had nuclear families all over the world. That, by itself, is a very racist statement, but the thing the American people ought to remember about this is there have been people who wanted to destroy the family for the last 200-plus years.

It actually goes back before Marx. It includes the people who participated in the horrid French Revolution. They all wanted a world free of God, free of commandments in the Bible, and they felt it would be a lot more fun to live life if they didn't have any marital obligations.

It is not surprising, in the crowning achievement of the left in my lifetime, the Great Society, that that program was designed to clearly bribe people not to get married.

It is not a surprise that, in his current budget, President Biden is putting more moneys in these programs. By putting more money in the program, he wants to increase the incentive not to be married.

I am going to direct people to one author, which I think is why I came to realize that the Great Society and the current American welfare system was almost, by design, trying to destroy the family. There is an author by the name of George Gilder, a great guy who is still alive.

George Gilder did studies as long back as the 1970s, and he followed people around in low-income areas, and what he found surprised him. When a young girl who wasn't married got pregnant, he had thought, like throughout most of history, that was cause of concern, that we better get married, that we have to scramble and get money to support her.

Instead, what he found, in certain areas where there wasn't a lot of money in the first place, it was a sign for glee because the woman and her boyfriend went around from office to office getting the then-called food stamps, getting the low-income housing, getting the WIC, getting the predecessor of the Medicaid. All of a sudden, they had it made in the shade because she got pregnant out of wedlock.

Hence, George Gilder pointed out, first of all, that this was bad for the child. He also pointed out something I wouldn't have thought about on my own. It was bad for the men because usually man's purpose in life is to take care of his family. If the government is going to weigh in and give all of these things to a woman and her child, it kind of takes away the purpose of a guy working, so they don't have a purpose in life.

In any event, I think the overly generous Great Society programs have led to the breakdown in the family, and they are one more example of what Nikita Khrushchev talked about, that being that they will cause America to collapse from within as we pay people to raise children not in the traditional, nuclear family environment.

There is a third way that I hope the press would begin to cover in which we are trying to chip away at America. It was actually touched upon briefly by the Democrats, of all people, though I don't think they realized what they were saying in a committee that I was at earlier this week.

Beginning in 1965, also under Lyndon Johnson, they began to create racial preferences in this country, and sexual preferences. At the time, the so-called minority population was much smaller than it is now. Nevertheless, they began to categorize people by where their great-great-great-great-grandparents lived, and we had Black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Pacific Islander Americans and Native Americans and Asian Americans. Recently, we have added to the bunch under the Biden administration because we want everybody to think of themselves as a hyphenated group, the Middle Eastern and North African Americans.

The Supreme Court has struck down college admissions, but they have turned every hiring decision in a company that does a decent amount of business with the Federal Government and every contracting decision into a decision not based on merit, but a decision based on race.

This is one way to destroy America. America has done such a good job under its first 200 years of causing people to view themselves as individuals, as Americans. The hard left, doing all they can, is trying to get Americans to view themselves as a small subgroup, and not only view themselves as a subgroup, but to ask for something on behalf of that subgroup.

I recently read a book about this topic, and the rationale for this is what I had feared it was all along, but this was laid out in the book. There was an important Communist sort of person, Socialist person by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who had a great deal of power over the radical--the radicals of the 1960s. Of course, at the time, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was the goal of these radicals to destroy the United States.

They had hoped to destroy the United States by breaking the United States into the wealthy versus the average guy. They thought the average guy would spring up, declare war on the wealthy, and we would sink the United States. That, of course, didn't happen.

America is a deeply religious country, which I think is one reason why the hard left hasn't succeeded in taking over America. America is also not the type of country who is jealous because somebody has a mansion or something. They failed. This kind of made Herbert Marcuse unhappy, and it made his disciples in Europe and the United States unhappy.

At the time, he laid out a plan to weaken the United States and take over the United States, and that is he was going to set one racial group against the other racial group. He felt that is how we could destroy America and eventually cause it to break down.

That is exactly what is going on today. They have succeeded in persuading even ethnic groups here sometimes to take advantage of set- asides based on background. It is particularly unusual when you look at all the subgroups in this country that are actually doing much better than the Americans who were here all along, Indian Americans, Chinese American, Filipino Americans, Cuban Americans, all doing better than the Native-born Americans, but never the left because they want to divide America and destroy America, these people have been told that we have a horrible country and they need the government to help them, and we will see what we can do to help them.

This is surely another way to try to destroy America, and the American public should know it is not just Glenn Grothman saying it. Herbert Marcuse, well-known Communist from the 1960s and 1970s, himself laid out this racial identification as a way to destroy America.

I have some questions that perhaps the press should look into but don't. In so far as they don't tell the real reason for these preferences, which is to destroy America, they say we are giving these preferences to make up for past prejudice or for current prejudice in our country. Like I said, I don't think it makes a lot of sense because the immigrant groups or many immigrant groups are perceived or succeed largely beyond what the Native-born do.

In any event, I think we ought to have a discussion. In order to get preferences, should you be born in America, or should you have to be born in America, or can you come here, say, straight from the Gaza Strip, come to the United States because of some family preference, and immediately be given preferences in government contracting or government hiring?

Is there a requirement for an individual to be considered a member of a group? Should it be \1/2\, should it be \1/4\, should it be \1/8\? Right now, you self-identify, and how that works out as a practical matter is something that should be discussed. Should we distinguish an immigrant between people who just show up here or have been here over a period of years?

I think it is odd, but one of the things that is true is, right now, if you are born in Spain, you are considered European and not eligible for preferences, but if your ancestors came from Spain and spent a few generations in Cuba, you are considered a person who is a victim of prejudice and gets preferences.

In any event, this is another way that I think we are chipping away at America.

There are two more ways that I think our enemies from within are trying to chip away at the United States and destroy it.

One is their attack on law enforcement. President Biden was an expert at standing in this Chamber and implying that the police, law enforcement of this country, was racist.

So many studies have been done showing that is not true, but if you are a hard left-winger and want to divide America, I suppose you could make up stories and say that. Because maybe one group is more in prison than another group, it must be because of racism. You should walk around with a chip on your shoulder, and you should blame your plight not on what you have done but on racism.

I think it is important that the studies that are out there showing there is not a racist problem with police in this country should be disseminated, so that when it is implied to young people in college or young people in high school that they should disrespect the police because of all this prejudice, the young people have the ammunition to ignore what their teacher or college professor is telling them.

The final thing that I think is going on that is weakening America is this transgender revolution. In August, like many Congressmen, I spent it in my district and rang some doorbells. There were two doorbells that were particularly disappointing to me and heartbreaking.

In both cases, the door was answered by a grandma, and in both cases, the grandma--seems a strange thing to tell her Congressman--was upset because, in one case, a granddaughter and, in one case, a grandson had gone down the transgender route.

Studies will show that the vast number of people here are going to back out of this lifestyle, but today, our government is doing what they can to try to normalize this lifestyle. I think some of these people are going to go down the path of being transgender their whole life, but some may go down 10 or 15 years. They may never have children of their own, and I really felt sorry for the grandparents whose, I think, children were victims of this transgender ideology.

For one, it was her only grandchild, and of course, it is not surprising where it comes from. At least some of it comes from the fact that the current administration is threatening to withhold funds from local school districts unless they go all in and have to allow like transgender boys into the girls' bathroom and such. In other words, they are trying to normalize transgenderism.

If you read a little bit about the history of feminism, this is what the extreme feminists want. They want no difference at all between men and women, and what would be a better way to get their utopia than have boys become girls and girls become boys.

In any event, it is disappointing to see that the current administration is pushing people into this lifestyle, and at least from what I have seen from meetings I have held in this building, you are going to wind up with a lot of very unhappy people who didn't have to be that unhappy.

In any event, these are five ways I think the hard left is trying to chip away at our great country, and I hope these are things that the press corps publicizes over the next couple of months as we head into this election.

They should talk more about what is going on at the southern border, with record numbers of people flowing here.

They should talk more about the continued push to provide material benefits that will cause less families to have both a mother and father at home.

We should talk more about this attack on law enforcement and publicize studies showing that law enforcement is not racist.

We should talk more about this revolution that would have been unheard of when I was a child, this transgender thing, which is causing people to adapt a lifestyle which is a very sad lifestyle. It will obviously, in many cases, result in people not having children.

We should talk a little bit more about this artificial racial divide that the left seems so determined to push on the American public. Again, I mentioned all the subgroups. The Biden administration this year has added another group, Middle Eastern and North Africans, even though people from Iran are doing fantastically well in this country. There is no evidence of prejudice, but the Biden administration still wants to add more people to the heap because, in part, they want to give something to people to buy their votes, but in part, they want to create more division.

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

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source