Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

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.

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 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 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.

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.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source