Glenn Grothman

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, today, I call upon the Trump administration to abandon the drastic Biden-Harris 14(c) rule. The 14(c) rule is with regard to allowing certain people with handicaps to work for under minimum wage. I have toured many work centers or shelter workshops in my district in which people who have different abilities are allowed to work--maybe they have spina bifida, maybe Down's Syndrome. I know a guy who is an outright quadriplegic. They are allowed to work for under minimum wage. They usually get some other sort of Federal subsidy, SSI or something, but by being allowed to work in these places, they are able to supplement their income. They have the dignity of work. They have the socialization of somebody outside of their families. I strongly encourage the Trump administration to abandon the drastic Biden-Harris 14(c) rule, and I encourage all of my colleagues in the U.S. Congress to tour some of their own shelter workshops, where you can see how valuable they are in the life of people who are given a little bit less than some of us in some ways to live their lives.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to hear from legislators on the experiences they had before this week as they toured their district and as they talked to normal people to see whether their concerns and observations squared with those of the people in this building. Donald Trump has done a great job of trying to remove the diversity, equity, and inclusion from our government, including our military. We have, to a degree, gotten rid of some of the bureaucrats who pushed this odious ideology in our businesses and our schools. Nevertheless, these bureaucrats everywhere are waiting to gain a foothold in America again as soon as we have another administration, and it is important to educate the young people in this country as to the degree to which America is really a broken system, a racist system, and whether white supremacy is a major problem, as Joe Biden said. While I was back home, I had an opportunity to speak to a mosque of Ahmadiyya Muslims. Ahmadiyya Muslims have a little bit different theology than Muslims in general. They are persecuted by those members of Islam who live in Pakistan, and many of them have had to flee Pakistan even with regards to their own personal safety. Nevertheless, when I met with the Ahmadiyya Muslims, there were two things that hit me: First of all, they were all successful, at least the ones I met. I asked them whether they knew of any of them that were having children out of wedlock. They knew nobody like that. They all seemed to be working hard and succeeding in America. This, of course, is at complete odds with the DEI ideology in which people who are not Europeans are struggling or can't succeed in America. Indeed, the Ahmadiyya Muslims are one more example of a group of people who are succeeding in this land of opportunity. Actually, they were very thrilled to praise America. They praised us not only as being a much better place to live than Pakistan, but they pointed out we are a much better place to live than Europe. They laughed at Europe, which they referred to as a ``socialist continent'' and one in which there was no room for people who wanted to work hard and get ahead. One more time, we have an example of foreigners who come here from other places who seem to appreciate America more than the native born and certainly appreciate America more than the average college professor. I would like to point out that another, I guess you would call, minority that is very common in my district is the Hmong, who came here from Laos. They as well are achieving, doing well, having strong families, succeeding in the realm of education, and all seem to have jobs. This despite the fact that when they came here from Laos, again, many of them didn't know the language. It, again, shows it is a lie for any of these DEI professionals--be they in business, government, or education--to say that America is not a place where people can succeed. As a practical matter, while I don't think the Hmong are a large enough minority to have statistics on how well they are doing economically, it is apparent subjectively that they are probably doing better than the average American who was born here and, indeed, larger minorities for which we have statistics. I remind everybody that people who come here from India, who are the most successful minority, Philippines, China, Japan, Cuba, the coast of western Africa all are succeeding wildly in America. All it takes is hard work and strong families, and all these groups have strong families. I encourage our educators and all our policymakers to educate the people back home on all the groups from all around the world who are doing a fantastic job. I think they are doing, in part, a fantastic job because they don't listen to the naysayers who want to run down America and apparently say that if you are not succeeding and things aren't going right, it is because of prejudice. The next thing I would like to point out is immigration is still in the news. There are some people who complain about Donald Trump doing what he so desperately has to do, and that is to remove the people who snuck into this country illegally. I want to point out to everyone that, again, in the last year we had many new Americans who were naturalized. There are people who say about the people who are being removed: Why can't we let them stay? We have a system in this country to make sure that we are getting the best people, the law-abiding, the self-reliant people, which is all we should need here. We took in 850,000 last year on a rolling 3-year average. I still believe we are at the all-time high of even more than that. We should be reminding anybody who says we are mean or not doing our share of taking in people who would rather live here that, in fact, we took in 850,000 naturalized citizens; those are new citizens. That is not including the approximately 10 million people who are here on student visas, work visas, or tourist visas. As far as people who want to spend a short time here, particularly to work, we are even more generous that way. I have heard of no strong efforts being made to greatly reduce these numbers. Again, we have to remind our young people, our constituents, not to put up with this anti-American rhetoric of why are we kicking these people out. We have to remind people every year that in this country we wind up swearing in about 850,000 new people legally. I think if you think about that number for a little bit, something that is far higher than the historical average in this country, you will realize it is ridiculous to say this country is in any way xenophobic. As I mentioned, one of the strong predictors of success in this country for everybody--for women, men, and children--is that of strong families. I think we have to spend some time pondering why it seems to be that people who are used to the American culture seem to have weaker family ties than those people who are coming here from other countries. It is my personal belief that the reason we have weak families in America--and one of the reasons why our American children cannot do as well as children whose ancestors come from Pakistan or India or Philippines--is that we have such strong incentives in America, through a horrible broken welfare system, to discourage mothers and fathers to stay together with their children. This began in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson, who I felt, before Joe Biden, was the worst President in this country's history. In the 1950s, we only had about 4 percent of American children born without a mother and father at home. We now have over 40 percent who are born without a mother and father at home. This doesn't mean there aren't wonderful single parents. I know some single parents, particularly emotionally strong single parents, who have done a fantastic job of raising their children. Anybody would be proud of them. However, the statistics make it obvious that overall children would be better off if they had a mother and father at home. Almost every program in what would be referred to as ``the welfare state'' has incentives to discourage there from being a mother and father at home. This is because eligibility for almost every program is based upon percent of poverty. If you are a single parent and don't have a job or are working part time, you are eligible for many other programs. I think probably the most damaging is that of low-income housing where if, say, a single parent has a child, even when they are a minor without another parent at home, you are eligible for low-income housing, which means almost no rent and the ability to get away from your parents. Other programs that also discourage marriage, programs that you would lose eligibility for if both parents were working and had a child are the food-share programs, the Medicaid programs, the earned income tax credit, the Pell grants. Indeed, I could go on. There are about 90 different programs in America which are designed to go to a single- parent family, but if you have a two-parent family making a decent income, they are considered not in poverty and, therefore, they are not eligible for a program. This is why, anecdotally, if you get out in your district, away from the fundraisers and such, you find so many stories of single parents who may even live with the other parent--sometimes illegally--but they don't want to get married because they lose all this money. Nobody is eligible for all 90 programs at once, but I don't think it is difficult to find hypotheticals in which a parent alone is eligible for maybe $25,000 or $30,000 that they would lose if they were married to the other parent. In other words, it seems like the policy of the United States is to try to discourage the strong families, which are one of the reasons why so many immigrants--be it the Ahmadiyya Muslims or the Cubans or the Mexicans or the Filipinos--seem to do so well in America, indeed frequently better than so many of the native born. We are soon going to pass a reconciliation bill, and that reconciliation bill will be a tremendous bill, a revolutionary bill. The bill, I think, is going to try to get America back to its roots. Certainly, one of the goals of this bill has to be to get rid of the huge marriage penalty, which has such an impact on causing there to be many fewer children with a mother and father at home than are necessary. I think it is important to look at all the programs I just named off, as well as a few others, particularly any low-income housing programs, because it is not right that a young person can receive their dream of renting an apartment, not in their parents' home, by having a child out of wedlock. I also want to point out with regard to these immigrants coming here, there are so many more than there used to be when I was growing up. Right now, as far as the people who feel we are not allowing enough people in this country, in the 1960s we were around 200,000 a year. Now we are around 850,000 a year. We are about four times what we were when I was a child. By historical standards, we have been very, very generous. The next question is: Why are we seeming to subsidize or have set up programs with an apparent hatred of having both a mother and father at home? You might think that every politician would be encouraging having both a mother and father at home, and this must have been an inadvertent thing. It is important for the young people today that they know that there is a strong number, it is a small number, but a strong number of intellectuals going back to the 19th century, actually even going back to the 18th century who are hostile to the idea of having a man in the home. Certainly, there were people who felt this way during the French Revolution when we had the atheistic mobs killing the clergy. It continued through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1800s. The Marxists were hostile to the family. A goal of theirs was to get rid of the family. It winds its way all the way up through communism and the feminists in the 1960s. Let me give you a couple quotes of people who are famous, who were well-known to people in the 1960s. We have Simone de Beauvoir: ``As long as the family and the myth of the family . . . have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.'' There is also Germaine Greer: ``I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family.'' Then we have Kate Millett, who some people would consider to be the mother, or whatever, of women's studies programs, which are all over our universities: ``The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the `revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.'' Eventually, Angela Davis, another person prominent in the revolutions that were taking place in the 1960s, was very antifamily. Even since I have been in Congress, we had the Black Lives Matter movement, who came out against what was referred to as the ``traditional family.'' This is not only a problem for children, it is a problem for the men. I think men are frequently more likely to cause problems and be less productive if they are not connected with a family, and social scientists like George Gilder have pointed this out. One of the reasons why I think we have a disproportionate number of men in prison, men doing drugs is because they are not connected with a family, and that was because of all these programs which provide financial incentives to make sure that one of the parents, usually the man, is not part of the family. Mr. Speaker, Black Lives Matter stated that they want to get rid of what is known as the traditional nuclear family. It is a group that a lot of people in this building were happy to stand with, despite stating that on their website. Eventually they took it down, but it shows the power even today. Mr. Speaker, you might ask why in the world anybody would be antifamily. Why would any politician do that? I mention these powerful people who seem to have a stranglehold on the Democratic Party. Who is for having men participate in women's sports? Who is for an abortion at 8\1/2\ months? Who is for men in the women's locker room? The same group is for them all. It is the same group that is against having children raised in a nuclear family. It is the radical feminists and their successors from the 1960s. As long as they have such a vise grip on the leftwing of this body, I am afraid they will continue to break down the American family. In any event, I think those are three things that we have to look at and remember to tell young people. It is the fact that people who are not from Europe come to America and succeed wildly again and again. Statistically, these groups are doing better than the native born, be it the Muslims, Hmong, Chinese, Filipino, Cuban, Nigerian, what have you. I think we have to remember that it is the welfare structure which is right now creating huge incentives not to raise children in a nuclear family. Frequently there is a penalty of $25,000 or $30,000 for getting married to the father of one's children. This affects so many other problems that we have in America. The crime problem is a family breakdown problem. The drug problem is certainly not exclusive, but it is a strong element of the family breakdown problem. In talking to teachers, particularly in the area of special education, frequently the problems stem from a breakdown in the family. We have to do something to remove these horrible marriage penalties. I really don't think America is truly going to be great again until we have a dramatic cut in 40 percent of children who are born without a mother and father at home. Those are three big issues today. We should educate the young people on all of the issues. Until they realize what our government is doing, they may go back to the days of Joe Biden, a time in which he tried to divide people by ethnic background. We will continue down the path of having huge incentives not to get married, and our young people will continue to be educated that America has a huge race problem and that we should not be adequately proud of America. As I mentioned, right now there are many examples of ethnic groups who are doing better than the native born today, which puts a lie to the idea that anybody is not succeeding in this country because their ancestors did not come from Europe. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, last weekend when I was home I saw a very good guy who was recently married. He already has two children, and he was happy because he was buying a new house. He had to save up money for a down payment to do it. The thing I noticed, though, is that during the 2 or 3 years that it took to save for the down payment, he had to live with his in-laws, which was fine because he had a strong family, and that is what it took to buy the house. It bothered me knowing that in other places in this country people are just given housing. They don't have to live with their in-laws, and, in essence, the government is treating them better than this example of a guy who was married and spent a couple years with his wife's parents. I hope in the future that this Congress changes the rules so we no longer benefit or raise this guy's taxes to set up someone for their own house immediately.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I will discuss the biggest highlight of the Trump administration so far, and that is what he has done at the border. We have gone from having over 300,000 people a month trying to get into this country to under 8,000 in February. That shows that, with a little bit of determination, we can enforce our immigration laws. Mr. Speaker, there was an important hearing that was not covered enough in this Congress this week. In the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, we brought in four Democratic mayors who refused to say that our immigration laws should be enforced. It is very difficult for President Trump to protect our country when we have elected officials, mayors and Governors from around the country, in essence saying: We are going to stand in the way of enforcing our immigration laws. It is time for the American people to stand up and tell their local officials that we want our immigration laws enforced. It is very difficult to enforce them if local law enforcement or social services are not on board.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we just got done with a very interesting week in which this House passed a budget bill, and now we proceed actually to the more difficult process in which, sometime over the next 4 months, we plan on passing both the reconciliation bill and appropriations bills. Between the two, we deal with all of government spending. As a result, we have an opportunity to look at programs and examine programs the way we haven't before, particularly because we have someone as President who is somewhat of a person who promises change. Clearly, his election meant that they want fundamental changes in government. Mr. Speaker, different programs have different goals. Just so the public understands, the appropriations bills are for what we call discretionary spending. The reconciliation bills are what are referred to as mandatory spending. Between the two bills that must eventually pass or several separate appropriations bills, we will be looking at virtually all of the Federal Government. Mr. Speaker, different programs have different goals, and obviously one of our goals has to be to reduce spending given that we have over $35 trillion in debt. Some of these programs also have goals that are perhaps intentional and perhaps unintentional. These are the goals that I am going to address today. By the way, this is relevant whether we are running a $1 trillion or over a $1 trillion increase in debt every year, or whether we were, in fact, in a surplus situation. I am going to look at some programs, which, again, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally, penalize people who are raising children while they are married. We had a hearing a couple of weeks ago in a subcommittee which I have been fortunate enough to chair. In that hearing, Robert Rector, who works for the Heritage Foundation, found approximately 90 programs in which eligibility depended upon having a small income. In other words, you would lose eligibility for these programs if you either worked and, depending on the program, made more than $12,000, made more than $25,000, made more than $50,000, or had somebody else in the household making more than this amount of money. This would include if, say, a single parent had a husband or a wife and the single parent was not working or making very little. If they married someone with an income of $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000, they would lose the benefits from that program. We are all familiar with some of these larger programs. I think most people wouldn't be able to name all 90, but there are things like FoodShare. There is the earned income tax credit, which requires a little bit of work, but as you work your way up and get a higher income in the company where you work, you would lose that. Low-income housing, which I think is maybe the worst program of the bunch because you are given housing if you are a young person, allowing you to get out from having to live with your parents as a benefit for having a low income. Medicaid; TANF, a cash benefit; childcare; Pell grants; payments for children with some disabilities, all of these programs are conditioned upon not making too much money and, of our primary concern today, not marrying somebody who makes too much money. Frequently, these programs are, in certain ways, more generous than the middle class normally receives. A perfect example would be section 42, low-income tax credits. I have known people who have looked for housing, and the housing they get is not as lavish as the housing available in low-income housing. The programs are set up in a way that the owners of the low-income housing are encouraged to build very modern, very upscale apartments that maybe some of the average people cannot afford. As a matter of fact, a lot of the average people may still be living with their parents for a while even after they get married. We have our Medicaid program, which is a fine program, providing healthcare for the poor. Again, there are a lot of people out there working who may have a $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 deductible on their medical payments, and of course the government program has, in most cases, no deductible. We have the FoodShare. All you have to do is talk to people who work in the food stores, and they will say that frequently people on the FoodShare program can afford types of food that the people who are working at the grocery store feel they cannot afford. Not only do we have these programs which are conditioned upon not marrying somebody with an income, but they even have benefits that are sometimes superior to people who are not taking advantage of these programs. I mentioned Robert Rector and what he said at the relevant hearing. The penalty for getting married obviously varies from person to person, but, in his example, a young person who married a father or mother of their children would be penalized by $28,000. It is, therefore, not surprising that, if my colleagues ask around, they will find examples of people who are living together but not getting married because they want the benefits. Inevitably, they will find the percentage of people getting married when they have children falls because the generosity of the programs is such that there is a feeling of: Why would I get married at all? These programs also cause cheating or breaking the law because, of course, they frequently don't catch it if you are getting cash off the books. All of these programs encourage working for cash. They also encourage, I think, earning money by doing things illegally because that is another thing that is not reportable. We were in a different hearing the other day, and there was a feeling of one of our witnesses who, I think, I would have to say leans toward supporting the Democratic Party. They didn't like the fact that sometimes people are stuck in the muck and are not making as much money as other Americans. This woman did not seem to realize that one of the reasons that people sometimes make less money is because they shouldn't try to improve their lot in their employer's company because, if they improved their lot, they would lose some of these 90 benefits. Mr. Speaker, a question is: Is this a penalty for getting married? It has had a huge impact on society. I point out that in the 1950s, 4 percent of the children in this country were born out of wedlock. That number is now over 40 percent. America has fundamentally changed because of these programs. The question is: Was this on purpose, or was it an inadvertent problem caused by these programs? I think most people would say that people didn't realize what they were doing. The fact that we have had the number of children born out of wedlock skyrocket from 4 percent to over 40 percent was an oversight. One thing I think America should realize is there were always radicals out there who were trying to get rid of the American family. Karl Marx, back in the 1800s, made it clear, I think, because he wanted the government to have the absolute power, that he felt that, to have his socialist paradise, we had to get rid of the family. In the 1960s, the leading feminists, who were celebrated by the left at that time, made it clear that a goal of theirs was to get rid of the nuclear family. Here is Kate Millett, who has been described as the mother of women's studies classes which dot our universities around the country: ``The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the `revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.'' Linda Gordon, another prominent feminist: ``The nuclear family must be destroyed. . . . Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.'' Michelle Barrett, in the book ``The Anti-Social Family,'' wrote: ``The family sucks the juice out of everything around it, leaving other institutions stunted and distorted.'' There is no shortage of radical feminists. I could quote Angela Davis, who some on the left view as a hero, as another person who was antifamily. More recently, Black Lives Matter, during their ascendancy a few years ago, in documents written by their founders, wanted to get rid of the Western-prescribed, so-called nuclear family. Even after that was out there on the internet, before they took it down, a significant number of people in this institution, I think, showed up at rallies, or whatever one would call them, sponsored by Black Lives Matter, a group that at least initially said they were against the traditional family. It is entirely possible that one of the reasons we have all of these programs is because some of the powerful feminists and Marxists that influence what goes on in this body were in favor of destroying the nuclear family. Mr. Speaker, people can say that there is nobody in this conference who would yield to these radical feminists. I remind the public that the radical feminists are for abortions at 8\1/2\ months. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues would say that nobody here would be for an abortion like that--oh, my goodness--but there are individual States that have that law right now, and that is what the radical feminists wanted. My colleagues would say that nobody would allow transgender women in women's sports, but, again, that is what the radical feminists want. They want to blur the distinctions between men and women, and almost all Democrats in this institution follow along and vote to allow transgender women in women's sports. There is the same thing about transgender women in women's bathrooms. My colleagues would say that nobody in Congress would be for transgender women in women's bathrooms, but, in fact, the Democratic Party is overwhelmingly for that. Now, ask yourself, if the Democratic Party is for these things, all of which would have been considered absurd 40 years ago--8\1/2\ month abortions, transgender in sports, transgender in women's bathrooms--is it too much to conclude that one of the reasons our government's programs are designed to destroy marriage is because the power of the radical feminists and the power of the Marxists in the Democratic Party. It has to be in there for some reason. It is something that we should look out for. I will point out one more time that I think this is the most critical debate that we are going to have over the next 4 or 5 months as we debate our appropriation bills and as we debate our reconciliation bills. This is a debate we should have regardless of whether we are in a difficult financial plight or not. I want to emphasize that I don't care if we are running trillion- dollar surpluses around here, the idea of putting out programs, substantially generous programs whose effect is to destroy the family, is wrong. While I certainly know many single parents who are doing a tremendous job and have done a tremendous job, when I talk to people in different fields, they say the explosion in families without a mother and father at home is causing other problems for society. When I talk to law enforcement, they feel one of the root causes of crime is the breakdown of the American family. I am sure, like everybody around here who has been in politics for a while, you sit in these committee hearings and hear the problems of high crime and murders and such, and people have suggestions as to how to deal with them, but we don't spend enough time pointing out that one way that would certainly reduce the crime rate, maybe back down to where it was in the 1950s, is to do what we can to build up the traditional family rather than what we do now, which is trying to have as few people as possible in the family. The second thing that I am told is that families of all backgrounds can have problems with drug abuse. Right now, we have over 100,000 people a year dying of drug abuse. It can happen everywhere, but again, when I talk to the professionals who deal with this, disproportionately, the 100,000 people who die every year are from difficult family backgrounds. This drug culture, I think, would be less strong in America if we did more to promote the traditional family rather than doing all we can to make sure the traditional family is weakened. The third institution I will point out that is harmed by this government's policy of penalizing traditional families is education. I know my friends on the other side of the aisle like to claim they care about education. When I have talked to school superintendents, when I have talked to teachers about the additional money that has to be spent on children with certain problems, again, those kids are disproportionately from families in which you don't have both a mom and dad there. Again, I know a lot of families like that who do a fantastic job, but I am pointing out that if you really cared about education, you would look at these programs that have caused the children who are born into a family with only one parent there to have skyrocketed from 4 percent to over 40 percent. I ask the chairman of the relevant committees that are going to have to deal with the appropriation bills and deal with their designated spending limits on the reconciliation bill to pay particular attention to the programs that are designed to penalize the nuclear family, which is so despised by Karl Marx and some of the radicals who were around in the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. One more time, remember, America has to know that 26 percent of every Social Security dollar, 26 percent of every new tank, 20 percent of every new education dollar is borrowed, at a time where interest costs are going up.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I think I have to address some of the things that I think are out of line or misspoke with regard to the other party today. First of all, I want to point out there are not a lot of details in this budget. The budget has a lot of top-line numbers in which we try to keep tax cuts that went into effect 8 years ago in effect because we had a strong economy with high employment. There are no specific cuts in here. The frustrating thing I hear from the other side is that they are talking about that any cut or any reduction in spending is a problem. Let me remind people, 26 percent of the current level of spending for the current year is borrowed. That should be of huge concern to everybody. The average American has about $100,000 as their share of debt. Think of that, a family of four has $400,000 in their share of the debt. The average person or the average American in the budget coming up this year will be spending about $20,000.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I have already spoken on the very significant hearing we had in the subcommittee regarding what is normally called welfare on Tuesday. There is another point I would like to make. In that hearing, it came out that, while it varies from couple to couple, there are about 90 programs which largely make up the welfare safety net, which if somebody were to get married, a single parent would get married to someone with an income, they would lose the benefits of those programs. We heard testimony from Robert Rector that you could easily come up with hypotheticals in which someone would lose $28,000 if getting married. In the 1950s in this country, the rate of children born without a mother and father at home was only 4 percent. We are now at 42 percent. This didn't happen by mistake. It is something that the radical feminists and the Marxists have always wanted: the destruction of the American family, particularly not having a man in the American family. As we work our way through the budget process and reconciliation process, I hope we all remember that it is not anticipated that America would be a country without families and get rid of these perverse incentives.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to highlight an underpublicized but important hearing that was held today. First of all, however, I would like to make one more time the point to my colleagues--because I recently heard one of the Senators grotesquely abusing the word--what form of government we have here today. The Senator--fortunately, it wasn't a Congressman, but sometimes they do it, too--twice, in two sentences in a row, referred to the form of government we have as a democracy. Of course, we all should know by now that we do not have a democracy. We have a Republic, and our forefathers had contempt for democracy. Alexander Hamilton said: We are a republican form of government. Liberty is never found in the extremes of democracy. John Adams: Democracy never lasts long. Benjamin Franklin, upon the completion of the U.S. Constitution: We give you a Republic if you can keep it. When we say the Pledge of Allegiance, what, again, do we say? We pledge allegiance to the flag and the Republic for which it stands. Nevertheless, again and again around here, people misspeak and, I am afraid, miseducate the younger generation into thinking we have a democracy. Why did our forefathers not like a democracy? Our Republic under our Constitution is designed to keep limited government and, therefore, liberty in the United States. Democracy, or representative democracy, means a majority of people are free to take property from anybody in here or take freedoms from anybody in here. If a clear majority of people say it does not like a religion or, as is increasingly true in this country, does not like religion at all or some of the precepts of religion, they believe in a democracy that they can impose their will on other people. One of the crises we are facing, which we are going to be talking about tomorrow night, is the huge debt we have. Why do we have such a huge debt? Under our Constitution, under our Republic, they were supposed to restrict the things that the Federal Government could spend money on. Instead, as we have gotten away from a Republic, and the arrogant people of this body think that we have a democracy--they think because they won an election or got 55 or 65 percent of the vote, they are free to either go into debt or spend other people's money until we are bankrupt. If they had realized all along that we are just a Republic, they would be humble before our Constitution and say: We cannot spend money on such and such. Go to your State legislator. I had a couple of groups from an educational institution in my office this week. Of course, they were asking for more Federal money. I didn't want to get angry with them or mad at them, but I just noticed that, one more time, a group of educators came before me and asked for more money. Because I won an election, they think I have the authority to give them other people's money. Well, I don't, and it is very irritating to see educators in particular say that we have a democracy when our forefathers disliked democracy and would have been terrified had they known. Right now, we are almost 250 years down the road. I am sorry, we are 230 years down the road from the founding of our Republic under our Constitution. I am sure our forefathers would be terrified if they knew how many people were under the impression that we were a democracy. America's Welfare System

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, now, I am going to talk about the hearing we had earlier today and what I think is probably, next to the out-of- control immigration system, the biggest crisis that we face, and that is our welfare system and a huge marriage penalty associated with it. When I talk about our welfare system, I talk of approximately 90 different programs that somebody who is almost broke is entitled to. Some you have to have children to be entitled to. All these programs, as you earned more money and went to work, you would lose eligibility. There are two things we could say about these programs. I should point out the testimony in a hearing today from a guy by the name of Robert Rector from The Heritage Foundation. There are examples--and I know there are even greater examples than this--that we penalize a woman who marries the father of her children $28,000 a year if she makes too much money or, scarier, if she marries a man to support her or to support their family. First of all, you might say: ``Well, that is hard to believe. Who wants to destroy the nuclear family?'' It is not hard to find people to destroy the nuclear family. We have Karl Marx, of course, back from the 1860s, who felt the family was the root of so many horrible things. We have Kate Millett, who I would describe as the mother of women's studies classes. Who knows how many of our poor college students have taken that drivel. She was very definite in the fact that she wanted to get rid of the American family and, in particular, wanted men outside the family. We also have Angela Davis, a 1960s radical who was still powerful when she spoke into the 1980s and 1990s. She was clearly opposed to the American family. Until they scrubbed their website, Black Lives Matter was against what they referred to as the Western-prescribed traditional nuclear family. These people all were against having a mom and dad at home with their children. You might say these people can't be that powerful, but you have to remember, the Democratic Party has proven that they can be led around by the nose by the most extreme elements of their coalition. That is why, even though they have to know better, they will vote for abortion at 8\1/2\ months. That is why the Democratic Party will vote for a boy pretending to be a girl going into the girls' restroom, because they will be led around by the most extreme group. Therefore, I don't think it should be considered a surprise that the Democratic Party has supported programs that overwhelmingly favor and encourage an end to the nuclear family. What type of programs are they? Almost any so-called antipoverty program you can think of. Certainly, food share would qualify. Even worse, any low-income housing credits in which if you are not married and don't have much of a salary, you get almost free rent. Of course, to somebody who is 19 or 20 years old, being able to get outside their parents' house and get free rent is something that is very tremendous, very desired. There is free healthcare, free daycare, Pell grants, which lead to free college tuition. All of these things are inducements to, as an Indian friend of mine said, result in the American system in which the women don't marry the men; the women marry the government. Another downside, of course, is not only that the children do not have a father at home, and they would be better off with a father at home, but the fathers don't have anything to do, which is a problem, as well. Normally, in life, the purpose or the goal of a man is to support his family, to be the husband and father of children. Of course, in the system encouraged by our welfare system, the men have nothing to do. If you look in areas of society in which we have maybe the worst results of the welfare system, most of the bad results happen not to the children--although the children are damaged--not to the women, but to the men. When you think of areas of the United States that are more associated with people taking advantage of these systems, these benefits, the men are the ones who are largely committing the crimes. The men are going to prison. The men are doing the drugs. We talk about it like it is society's problem. It is society's problem, but it was caused by an out-of-control welfare system that left the men with nothing to do. This was well documented by George Gilder, the great sociologist of the 1970s who followed around a young couple when the young gal got pregnant. He noticed it was not cause for concern. It was cause for celebration because of all of the benefits that were available. A thing that really brings this home is the fact that frequently these programs provide a more beneficial system than even a low-income married couple has. We all know that when you talk to the clerks at the grocery store, they will frequently tell you that the people on the government are buying food that they themselves don't feel they can afford. We know that many young couples starting out may live with their parents, which is probably a good thing because the grandmas and grandpas can teach the young couple ways to live. Unfortunately, here, they are not only given their own apartment but an apartment that is superior to most other apartments. When I had a staffer get married and look for an apartment back in Wisconsin, they found the best apartments were the low-income housing. Why were the best apartments low-income housing? It is because we have a tax provision called section 42 in which we give overly generous subsidies to property developers to build new low-income housing. Since the government pays up to 70 percent of the cost of the housing, the developers, of course, are able to make those new apartments, which already are better than the old apartments just by their age. The new apartments are particularly nice because the government is paying for 70 percent of them. You get better apartments than you would for your sister who is getting married and having a husband. We know that, frequently, middle-class families either choose not to help their children out when they go to college or don't have the money to help them out, and they wonder why somebody who comes from a family which maybe was living off the government in the first place gets free Pell grants and close-to-free college tuition, whereas the middle-class family does not. When you look at the medical--and we don't want to take away anybody's medical care, but when you look at the medical, frequently people who have a job in the private sector may have a $10,000 or $15,000 deductible. Instead, people on the system have no deductible or almost no deductible. It is usually no deductible. Again, the government sets one up in which you are in better shape if you don't get married and marry the government. As I said, a lot of the problems wind up landing on the men who have no purpose in life since the government has bribed the mother to raise the children without a father in the home, but it results in a lot of problems that this institution debates separately. Over 100,000 people die every year in this country from illegal drugs. They can come from any family. I want to emphasize that there are single parents who do a fantastic job. I know so many single parents, and their children would make anybody proud. Nevertheless, when I talk to law enforcement, disproportionately the number of people who die of drug overdoses come from a difficult family background. If we were serious about doing something about fentanyl, we would be addressing the family background. Now, we have nice bills this week. Though, they may be technically flawed--increasing the penalties for people with fentanyl--but if we really want to go after the 100,000 deaths, you figure you would want to do something about the family, but we don't care that much. Crime. When I talk to law enforcement about crime that is going on, again and again they will talk about the family being broken down as the reason we have so much more crime than we did 50 years ago. As we get away from the crime caused from the tragic events in Minnesota, they have dropped the last couple of years. However, nevertheless, crime is much greater than it was before we passed the Great Society in the mid-1960s. If we were serious about doing all we could to fight the crime in this country, we would address the current welfare system, which discourages making up a traditional intact family. In other words, I would not say that this institution is being entirely sincere in saying all they can do to fight crime when we continue to allow this welfare system to ramble on, give the men no responsibility, and have the high crime. Another thing we spend a great deal of time talking about here is education. I was talking with my school superintendents about a month ago, and we talked about special education and the children who were having special problems. My school superintendents agreed that disproportionately those problems were caused by people with a tough family background. In other words, it is caused by the actions of this body who have set up a welfare system that discourages intact families. This is the primary reason I ran for this job several years ago. If you are in a city council, if you are in a State legislature, and you want to address these problems like drugs or crime or the education system, you quickly realize that a lot of the problems are caused by the breakdown in the family, and that the Federal Government, who caused the problem in the first place, is doing nothing to solve the problem. I ask our leadership, and I ask President Trump, in this important bill we are going to pass sometime in the next 2 or 3 months, to address our welfare system, which is designed to bribe, usually mothers, to raise the child without a father providing the support, without a father in the home. It is hard to believe we are trying to make America great unless we revisit the horrible welfare system. There is one more thing that I think the press has not covered enough that I would like to touch upon today, and that is one of Donald Trump's great executive orders. He is doing a good job here. One of the things that I would like to get rid of and I thought it would take maybe 10 or 12 years to do, Donald Trump--at least temporarily until we have a Democrat President--got rid of it with a stroke of a pen. In 1965--and something I think should have been unconstitutional-- Lyndon Johnson, with the stroke of a pen, said he would no longer enforce Executive Order 11246, which was an order put into effect by Lyndon Johnson that--well, he would argue it wasn't requiring--as a practical matter, it created an affirmative action type system in which preferences were given to women over men and preferences were given to people based on racial background. Now, there are absurdities in the order in the first place. You could be a very well-off, say, Asian American worth millions of dollars, but you would be considered a minority in need of help. You could be somebody who just came to America a week ago, and you would be considered a person who needed help, and, for diversity purposes, would be given preference over a person of European descent who was around here for 50 years. I have told the story when I was first made aware of this before, and I will tell it again so you can see how it worked out as a practical matter. I got a call from a human resources professional who worked for a company that had at least 50 employees and did at least $10,000 of business with the Federal Government. They hired out a firm to tell them how to negotiate this executive order. I might have these numbers off by one, but they were told that when they had five engineers and wanted to hire a sixth engineer, that sixth engineer better be a woman. It didn't have to be a woman, but they had to prepare to show the Federal Government that they did all they could to find a woman. They went from three to four members of management, and they were again told: If you are going to hire a fourth member of management, see if you can make it a minority. If you can't, that is fine, but you have got to prove that you went out of the way to find someone. As a practical matter, we had the Government weighing in, giving preference to one person over the other person for different jobs in this company. Because I tried to do something with this when I was in the State legislature, people would come up to me with other examples. There were plenty of examples. This applies not only to employees of Federal contractors, but the Federal contractors themselves. Recently, I had even heard stories of people in which the Federal Government is going to pay significantly more--which I think is illegal--for preferred contractors rather than men of European descent. It is not only costing the taxpayer money, but they were incredibly unfair to these people. Sometimes you get around it by maybe it is a guy, maybe he puts his wife in charge of the company, and that way he can say we have got a woman-owned business, and they should get preferences. In any event, Donald Trump, with the stroke of a pen, got rid of this ridiculous law. It could be challenged in court. I am sure the Supreme Court will uphold President Trump. I would hope this body would get rid of this law once and for all. It would be hard to get it out of the Senate. I think a lot of Americans don't know it exists. I didn't know it existed until 12 or 14 years into my political career. I thank Donald Trump for making sure one more time we are hiring the most qualified people we can find. We are contracting with the best that we can find. In any event, there are three stories for you today, Mr. Speaker. Let me remind you one more time that we are a republic, not a democracy, and our forefathers were scared to death of having a democracy. I, one more time, will point out the huge penalties that the welfare system has on a man and a woman who want to get married together and raise a child. I hope that this body takes up that problem. It is not an easy problem to take up, but if we care at all about the next generation or the generation after the next generation, we have to walk our way back from the insane policies put into place by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. One more time, we thank Donald Trump for allowing the government and contractors of the government to hire or contract with the best they can find. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, as we wrap up this week, we will go home. If it were me, I would read books or read various topics. Last night, I saw a book I read many years ago and am going to read again. It is called: ``Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem.'' Right now, we have a huge problem in that men are being kept out of their families. Now is the time to address this problem, with Republicans having the Senate, House, and Presidency. We cannot seriously say we are taking on the fentanyl crisis, the crime crisis, and the education crisis unless we do something about getting men back in the family. There have been powerful forces in this country. There are a lot of people and important people who, sadly, follow Karl Marx. The feminists in the sixties followed Kate Millett, the mother of women's studies. Later on, it was Black Lives Matter. All of them wanted to destroy the nuclear family. Now is the time we have to undertake policies to get men back in the family.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, it seems like every day there has been such good news coming out of the White House. It is easy to lose track of some of the executive orders coming from President Trump, but I would like to bring attention to one today. Once this executive order is in effect, there is nothing Democrats will be able to do to stop it. That is the executive order reinstating servicemembers discharged under the military's COVID-19 vaccination mandate. It is hard to believe that only 4 years ago we had a President who was demanding that all our brave servicemembers had to take an experimental vaccine, and if they didn't take it, they would be removed from the service. President Trump has reinstated these folks. President Trump is a great man of compassion. He is a man who respects independent thought; unlike a lot of people who feel: One guy who went to college told me this, so I better do it. I know a lot of other people who didn't get the vaccine. They did a very good job of researching the vaccine and had solid reasons for not getting it. I thank President Trump for reinstating all of our brave servicemen who were unfairly forced from the military.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, there has been so much in the news in the last 2 weeks, it is hard to know where to start. I will cover a couple issues that the mainstream media has picked up on, though not done the best job uncovering, and one issue that made a huge difference in the lives of the most vulnerable of us that Donald Trump weighed in on not by doing something but by allowing an administrative rule to die. The first great victory for Donald Trump, which hasn't been reported out there, concerns the effort by the Biden administration, which ran out of time, to get rid of what they call 14(c) certificates. Everybody may be familiar with light manufacturing or packaging done in their district by people who are handicapped. Maybe they have spina bifida, maybe they have Down syndrome. In any event, for this reason, they are not able to be profitably employed for above minimum wage or minimum wage dollars. Each State does it a little bit differently, but the States make an estimate of what that employee is worth, and maybe they are paid $5 an hour for, like I said, light manufacturing or packaging. If you tour these facilities--and I think every Congressman ought to tour them at least once--it is one of the most enjoyable things you can do, because you will find the people who have been dealt a difficult lot on life so happy to see you, so happy to see what they are doing with you, so happy to make friends with the other employees there who have different abilities and other employees who are usually in a supervisory capacity. These are also a godsend to the parents or guardians of these folks. Under normal circumstances, they have to worry when the guardians or parents die off what type of friends and what type of social life they will have, but because they frequently stay in these facilities or work in these facilities for 20 or 30 or 40 years, they develop lifelong friendships which are so important for these folks to have. Now, had Donald Trump not won the election, it would have continued to work through the administrative rule process, and it is entirely possible that these sort of facilities would have been shut down by a Biden or Harris administration. They were working toward that. You might say, why would anybody take away the right for these people to have these jobs. The reason is, they will say, because if we are paying somebody $5 an hour, we are taking advantage of them. We can't take advantage of them, so we would rather have them shut down. How horrible is that? To the most vulnerable members of our society, Joe Biden was prepared to say, if you want to work here for $5 an hour, tough. We are going to close that facility, or we will leave the facility open, but you will no longer be able to work. You will no longer have the pride of being able to get a paycheck and spend it on clothes for yourself or gifts for your parents, what have you. Mr. Speaker, I thank President Trump for not continuing with that administrative rule. At least, probably for the next 4 years, we know the jobs of these folks, which mean so much to them--more to them than I would say the average citizen in our society--I thank President Trump for allowing the most vulnerable members of our society to have the choice to continue to work for, in some cases, subminimum wage, but have the enjoyment of that independence. I should point out that almost all the people I am talking about have some SSI payment in addition to that, so it is not like they are expected to pay a mortgage with their $5-an-hour job. They get other governmental assistance, as well. I know there are a lot of other things we have been grateful to President Trump for these last couple weeks, but keeping the 14(c) certificates is a tremendous victory for the most vulnerable of us. I don't think it would have happened if President Trump didn't get elected. Now, the next thing to look at. We have heard people talk about Elon Musk and what he wants to do to USAID. First of all, I will point out that the reason people are mad at Elon Musk, who can't do anything on his own--all he can do is advise the President. The reason they are mad at him is, horror of horrors, he thought there was a government program that wasn't necessary. That is not the way things work here. Nobody believes that if Elon Musk had Donald Trump's ear and came out for more preschool, if he came out for more mental health funding, if he came out for expanded government daycare, the folks on the other side of this aisle would be praising Elon Musk for being a forward- looking person and for doing what people on that side of the aisle want to do, which is either expand old programs or come up with new government programs. Quite frankly, as long as I have been here, I am sure there must be some government program that ended, but I can't think of any. Elon Musk is under attack for actually suggesting a government program is unnecessary. I praise him for that. There is nothing wrong with him advising President Trump. I don't know if folks would feel better if they gave him a position and $100,000-a-year salary. I don't know, but it is refreshing that some of the most successful people in America can use their mind, their brains to advise President Trump on how to be a good President. It is particularly good to have somebody outside this building who is not used to the swamp-type mentality of we never under any circumstances get rid of a program; the only question is whether we are going to expand it 2 percent or 8 percent. It is great to have a friend who can look at some programs and say, hey, maybe this program sounded good when we first created it in 1963 or whatever, but it hasn't worked up to snuff. Of course, I agree with Elon Musk that some of the money spent on these programs is even a moral stain on the United States of America, particularly a moral stain because we are spending money in other countries. When we talk about gender-affirming care, that is where they give puberty blockers to young children. I think it is horrific that we would give puberty blockers to a 12 or 13 year old in America, but America is supposed to be the light unto the world. Can you imagine the United States weighing in and giving gender- affirming care to the poor little children in Guatemala? I mean, how bad can we be? How embarrassing can we be? That is what we do with the incredible amount of wealth that this country has been given? We take our wealth and try to screw up--what I would say is ``screw up''--the poor little children in Guatemala? I am glad Elon Musk came across this program, and upon people pointing out what is in the program, I am glad that Donald Trump, when he heard about it, full bore put his foot on the brake and said if the people running this program are spending the money that way, we have to stop spending money right away and look a little bit further into the program. In any event, what I am going to do is, I am going to ask people on that side of the aisle to take an honest look at themselves. If Elon Musk announced that we needed more preschool, if Elon Musk announced we were going to need more mental health, with where the mental health professions are today in favor of these puberty blockers and that sort of thing, would they really be concerned that he is advising President Trump, or would they be praising him? Would The Washington Post and The New York Times be praising Elon Musk for being openminded and ignoring the hidebound conservative members of the Republican Party? Of course, they would be praising him. The only reason they question whether or not he can advise President Trump is because they don't like, for almost the first time, the first time that I have been here, that we genuinely are seeing a government program begin to end, hopefully. The third thing I will point out is that President Trump signed a bill today dealing with men in women's sports. It was a good bill. There are not a whole lot of men participating in women's sports around the country, but it is certainly a little weird that when one sets up a swimming tournament, a track meet, or something where it is very clear we have the men's event and the women's event, that under any circumstances we take a man and say, well, just because you feel like a woman today, we are going to pretend you are a woman. I think that is unusual enough. I am going to hope--and President Trump has had executive orders on this topic, as well--that we are able to do something statutorily about getting rid of government funding for programs that do things like give surgeries on minors, give puberty blockers on minors. There is no shortage of intelligent people who will say this is damaging, not to mention there are a huge number of people with just plain common sense who realize that you don't try to engage in irrevocable medical procedures with 14- or 15-year-olds. In fact, I would say it is medically inexcusable to engage in these procedures when people are 24- or 25-years-old. After all, in this country, you know, you can't buy a beer until you are 21 years old, can't buy a cigarette until you are 21 years old. I wouldn't think any medical professional with any morality--I realize they are making money on this--would harm these young people. Now that we took care of the ridiculous idea that men should be able to pick whether they are men or women, depending upon, I guess, whether there is a track meet that day, I hope our leadership team begins to go after these so-called medical professionals who are doing irrevocable damage, either with drugs or surgeries, on people under 18. Quite frankly, they ought to be barred for people under age 21. Quite frankly, the medical society ought to, on their own, make it clear that it is medical malpractice to do this sort of thing even on a 25- or 26- year-old because we all know very well that the way we feel about things when we are 20 or 24 or 25 is frequently very different from the way we feel about things when we are 30 years old. I thank the gentleman from California for allowing me to address these issues. Remember, folks out there, if you have a ward or a child who worked for what used to be called a sheltered workshop, President Trump kept your ward or child employed the way they want to.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, it is always enjoyable to speak to Bible Week and always enjoyable for Doug Lamborn to give me a couple of minutes. National Bible Week, of course, begins every year on Thanksgiving and continues for the week after Thanksgiving. One of the prior speakers, searching to say something unique about the Bible, talked about the number of books that have been printed. I would like to point out, since we are commanded under the Bible to share the Word of Christ and spread the Word of Christ around the world, the Bible, I believe, is the most translated book in the world. The Bible is right now translated into 3,700 different languages, which is a testament to the degree to which Christians are taking it to heart to spread the book throughout the world. Now, the reason we have Bible Week in the United States is the Bible is more important than any other book in putting together our Constitution, putting together the laws we live under. There was a study done by something called the American Political Science Review in which they reviewed all the writings by our Founding Fathers: John Dickinson, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, the whole bunch. They found that the Bible was the most cited book of our forefathers. That is not surprising. What I did find interesting is that one-third of the citations in the writings of our forefathers were from the Bible itself. I find this hard to believe, but in the article, they said the most cited book in the Bible was Deuteronomy. I would have guessed it was somewhere in the New Testament or Psalms. Even I will say that Deuteronomy is the most cited book in the Old Testament other than Psalms. In any event, why was Deuteronomy so cited? I think Deuteronomy is so cited because Deuteronomy lays out the law that the Israelites were supposed to follow when Israel was founded. Our forefathers looked at Deuteronomy because they, as well, wanted us to form a country that God would bless and God would protect. That is why Deuteronomy was so cited. This does not mean that they did not quote the New Testament. There are plenty of references from John, 1 Corinthians, from the other gospels that our forefathers mentioned because I think they felt it was of necessity to look at these quotations in learning how to live. I should also point out that the Bible our forefathers read was largely from the English language. They lived at a time when we were having the American Revolution. America was being founded, and we read an English Bible. When the French Revolution was going on, it was somewhat the opposite of our country. The French revolutionaries were atheist. They were barbaric. They killed the nuns. They killed the priests. It was horrific. It was an interesting juxtaposition even at that time between what I guess today we would call maybe the communist element, the French, and what we have in America. I should also give a couple of quotes from our forefathers showing how important they felt the Bible was. These quotes do not mean a political party. It means kind of an ideology or way to put together your country. John Adams said the Bible ``is the most republican book in the world.'' John Dickinson, who was the most important member of Delaware in our founding, said the Bible ``is the most republican book that was ever written.'' He even ups it one more. You can see the degree to which our forefathers lived by the Bible. It is because they lived by the Bible and stuck by the Bible that we have become such a blessed country. We have to continue to follow the Bible if we kind of want to get back on the straight and narrow. One more time, I thank Congressman Lamborn for giving me a few extra minutes.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I had an interesting conversation today with someone who deals with people in the lower economic classes. It was an interesting conversation because it was along the same theme that I often speak about behind this podium. That is the frustration she finds in the poor communities where the clergy again and again encourage young people to get married. The young people inform the clergy that they can't do it because the United States Government has established a bunch of programs that make it financially advantageous to not get married. Indeed, it is not unusual to have $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000-a- year penalties for couples who get married, as opposed to situations in which a man is not in the household. Mr. Speaker, I strongly encourage my colleagues in this Chamber to, over the next few months, undo the horrid disincentives toward forming families that were put in by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I will address the Biden administration's treatment of community rehabilitation providers. I think many people would be aware of them as a place for people with some disabilities, perhaps Down syndrome, whatever, to work because their abilities are a little less than a lot of other citizens. In any event, in order to operate these places, they need 14(c) certificates to have people work for under minimum wage. They can afford to work for under minimum wage because they are getting other benefits such as SSI. However, these facilities are very important to them. It gives them a purpose in life, a little bit of independence to earn their own paycheck, and a chance to socialize with so many other people they wouldn't otherwise. I am going to introduce legislation shortly to make sure the Biden administration, on the way out the door, does not get rid of 14(c) certificates, which are necessary for these valuable citizens to work full time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, obviously, we are about to begin a new session, and one more time I would like to review what I think are some of the major mistakes that this body has committed over the last 50 or 60 years that we should be revisiting now, now that it is apparent the American public wants some change. It is a goal of this body, and really even a constitutional mandate, that we treat everybody equally and that we don't prefer one group of people or ethnic group of people over another group of people, people of one lifestyle over another lifestyle. Nevertheless, one more time I think I have to bring up that it is very apparent that we are treating people differently and that is particularly with regard to people who elect to raise children in marriage and people who, for whatever reason, sometimes their fault sometimes not their fault, elect to raise children out of marriage. Mr. Speaker, if you look at almost every single government program, they are conditioned or based upon percent of poverty. If you are below a certain income level, then you are eligible for that program, and if you are above a certain level, then you are not eligible for benefits under that plan. Since in a household with a man and woman both there and both parents of a child, it is overwhelmingly likely that one of them is working full-time, they will be making $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 or more, that couple will almost never be considered to be in poverty. Mr. Speaker, if you have another situation in which the mother and father are in different households, if one of these people is not working or working minimally, making maybe $15,000 or $16,000 a year or less and the other person is working full-time, then that is considered to be not in poverty. As a result, financially, there is an incentive to make a household in which the mother and father are not both there the norm. Now, almost all of the programs that began with the so-called war on poverty in the 1960s gave grants or money to people who did not have both a man and a woman in the household. Some of these programs at the time were known as food stamps, some were healthcare, what is known as Medicaid, or different States have different words for it. In Wisconsin we call it BadgerCare. We have low-income housing which is, again, available only to people with low income. As a matter of fact, in a lot of these low-income housing projects one of the goals they have when they hire managers is to make sure that there is not a man in the household or a father in the household because then you shouldn't be able to take advantage of the program. There used to be cash grants called AFDC which were eliminated during the Gingrich/Clinton years, and they, again, gave cash basically to people in situations where you did not have a mother and father at home. It has since been replaced by TANF grants. If someone does decide to work 14, 15, or 20 hours a week there are grants for daycare that are not eligible for situations in which you have both parents at home. If you want to go to college, there are grants called Pell grants available, but not available to people in which you have both the mother and father at home. This should concern us all. It is not difficult to come up with hypotheticals. Another program which kind of discourages full-time work is called the earned income tax credit program where a family can wind up with $5,000 or $6,000 that you won't get if you are making say more than $40,000 a year or married to somebody with a normal income. We have to revisit this problem. These programs have changed America such that in 1965 before these programs kicked in, only about 5 percent of children born in America were born to a family without a mother and father at home. That number is now over 40 percent. Other programs have become more popular. Something I think we ought to remember is that it is not the cost that bothers me as much as it is what it is doing to America. At the turn of the century, we had about 17 million people on FoodShare, what people call food stamps. That number is now 42,000. In other words, we have over doubled the number of people on food assistance. America is very generous. I tour my food banks all the time. They do a fantastic job. Mr. Speaker, I love those food banks. America does have to cover people, but in order to get on food stamps, Mr. Speaker, you need a lower income, and I think we ought to be spending more time wondering why. Right now, unemployment is almost nonexistent, but despite the fact that we have almost nonexistent unemployment, we skyrocketed up from 17 million to 42 million people on food stamps. So it is important. I want to dig into these programs because some of these programs give people on the programs benefits that people not on the programs would not use. Mr. Speaker, if you talk to your clerk in the local food store they will comment, if you ask them frequently, that people on the government benefit are buying things that the people behind the counter would not think of buying. We have to ask ourselves: Is that right? There is a housing program called section 42 which, in my opinion, does more to benefit property tax developers than it does to benefit the people living in the housing. There is a program in which because the government pays for 70 percent of the cost of the housing, the housing built for so-called low income is frequently nicer or more lavish. If you look at the kitchen counters and if you look at where they build the properties, they are more lavish than the average American finds. I had a staffer a little while ago who got married, and when she and her husband were looking for housing, they were disappointed to find that the nicest housing was all low income and they would not be able to afford such nice housing. I talked to a property developer, and he found it difficult to buy new land for new apartment projects because he always got outbid by the developers who were having 70 percent of their projects paid for by the government. I have got two problems there. One is the general marriage penalty associated with the programs and the other is whoever put the program in there and supports the program appears to me to be more concerned about making money for property developers than even the people who need the low-income housing. I should point out that some low-income housing is going to be a necessity. We have people on Social Security whose incomes are so low that they can't even afford an apartment. I can understand the reason for this housing. Overall, the point is that we, right now, are operating a policy in this country and have been operating the policy for 50 years that says: We don't want both mom and dad in the home with the children. George Gilder has written a lot about this problem. Robert Rector has written a lot about this problem. There is no question that one of the reasons we have gone from 5 percent of the children born without a mother and father at home to now over 40 percent is that the problem is the government is encouraging this. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out, you may say, well, that is sure surprising. This is not something that we wanted. However, there are a lot of people who actually view the American nuclear family as a problem. Karl Marx, which seems kind of strange, 170 years ago felt a goal of the hard left, the progressive left, whatever you want to call it, was to abolish the family. There are names that maybe are forgotten, but in the sixties, we had the radical feminists like Kate Millet, who was a well-known person, talked about destroying the American family. She, for whatever philosophical reason, didn't want men in the household. So there are people who want this. Two of the three people who founded Black Lives Matter called for ending the so-called Western prescribed nuclear family structure. There is no question that about 5 years ago around here Black Lives Matter was perceived to be a very powerful institution, and a lot of people spoke about it positively. So it is important to remember they wanted to get rid of the nuclear family. How are we going to get back to where we used to be, where almost all children had a mother and father at home unless there would have been some catastrophe and one of the parents would have died? I think that is something that we should be looking at unquestionably over the next 3 months. This is a totally artificial thing. When I talk to people in other countries, such as Korea and India, it is almost unheard of all of this not having the father in the home. Why did it happen in the Western countries and the United States? No question, I think the reason is government policy has encouraged it. I hope that, in the next 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 months, as we look at government programs, we have as our goal not discriminating in favor of families that don't have a mother and father at home and, even more importantly, stop discriminating against and displaying hatred and inequity against families in which both mother and father are at home. One other anecdote of a program, Pell grants, which I mention just briefly. I have been talking about this, even before I got here, for 25 years of my life, and once I talked to a young gal who must have been 23 or 24 about the marriage penalties associated with college scholarships, what she thought about this. She said she and her husband got married before they were having children, but none of her friends were getting married because they got free college. In other words, they wanted to have the government pay for their college, and they realized that whoever puts together this Food Stamp program had, whether it was intentionally or unintentionally, put together one more program in which you were discriminated against if you were married and actually were discriminated against if your parents were married. It is another problematic situation here, and I hope that the American public and conservatives around this Capitol and throughout the country demand a situation in which we stop discriminating against the old-fashioned nuclear family. I think that is the most important problem facing America and the next Congress. It is a difficult issue to deal with because you don't want to be labeled mean or cruel. On the other hand, as a public policy, I think coming up on 60 years, maybe 55 years, brazenly discriminating against a nuclear family with a mother and father at home has to end. We should stop treating the mother-and-father family at home so poorly. We should stop penalizing them by keeping the newer apartments off the market for them. It is not right that they can't afford things in the food store that maybe people with potentially lower income are. As far as health insurance is concerned, we discriminate against middle-class America. They frequently have big, $15,000 to $20,000, deductions on their healthcare, deductions that we would not give to somebody who, under normal circumstances, does not have both parents in the home. This is another example of discrimination and another example of policy in which we try to destroy the American family. I think the first step here is to have more and more people talk about it. I think the American people should be aware of it. The American people should not be supportive of any program that so brazenly discourages having a mother and father at home. I realize it can happen. I will finish with this. When this was first brought to my attention, there was a great author by the name of George Gilder, who wrote books about this family situation in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and he actually studied what was known as the ghetto at the time in Albany, New York. He followed around a young couple, a man and a woman, after the young woman got pregnant, was going to become a mother. George Gilder was probably born around 1940. He felt at the time that that would be cause for concern and alarm, that the young woman was pregnant. In fact, he found out that, at that time in Albany, New York, it was not considered a bad thing, but it was considered a good thing because now they would be eligible for food and eligible for medical care and finally be able to get out from under their parents. They were given their own apartment. By the way, I find that in my district, too. When I talk to people administering the low-income housing, it is not unusual that people get into low-income housing because they are leaving their parents' house, which a lot of young people want to do, but I guess one way to get your own apartment is to have a child. I am not sure that is a good thing. In any event, George Gilder, looking at things, found a certain subset of society that felt it was monetarily beneficial to have a child without the father legally around. As a result, we were probably shifting society away from and discriminating against the mother and father at home. George Gilder made another observation as he studied this class of people. Traditionally, in our society, the purpose of the father has been to support the family, and George Gilder found that, frequently, fathers' income went up and responsibility level went up as he got married and had children and assumed the role of being the breadwinner and responsible for paying the mortgage, that sort of thing. As we got away from having the father in the home, they lose that motivation or that purpose in life. As they lose that purpose in life, they are more likely to do drugs and more likely to not be as productive citizens. In other words, the dad becomes more productive after he gets married, not before he gets married. Not only is this, I think, the current policy, a problem for children, but I think it is a big problem for men, as well. It is something that isn't talked about nearly as much as it should be, but sometimes people wonder why there is such a higher percentage of men incarcerated than women, a higher percentage of men dying of drug overdoses compared to women. I think part of it is because it has been the policy of the Federal Government to chase men out of the household. In any event, I leave my conservative friends around the country with this desire: over the next couple of months or 3 or 4 months, we talk about the perverse incentives and the apparent hatred of the American government for households with a man and woman both available to raise the children, and we work toward an equitable government in which we at least treat the two-parent family equally in the eyes of the government, as we do families in which both parents are not available. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers), my good friend. Honoring Neil Middleton for His Distinguished Service

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, it has been almost 2 months since Congress has reconvened. Certainly, a lot of things have taken place back home, things in the news that are a little bit shocking and ought to be commented on. The first thing I would like to point out--and we saw this again in the first week back--a prominent Member of this Congress spoke about the need to protect democracy. Again and again, people from both sides of the aisle, but disproportionately from the Democrat side of the aisle, talk about the necessity of protecting democracy and refer to our country's democracy. I remember hearing this for the first time when I was at Marquette University, one of the largest universities in the State of Wisconsin. A professor of government or history or something like that referred to our country as a democracy. When we recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day, they might want to ponder that we talk about the Republic, the Republic for which it stands. We don't talk about the democracy for which it stands. People might wonder why politicians like to refer to our form of government as a democracy but in the Pledge of Allegiance we refer it to as a Republic. At the time our Constitution was drafted, Ben Franklin talked about giving us a Republic if we can keep it. In other words, he didn't say a democracy if we can keep it. He said a Republic if we can keep it. You might wonder whether our forefathers ever mentioned democracy. Of course, they did. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote: ``Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.'' In other words, James Madison did talk about democracy, and he talked about it negatively. Why don't politicians like to talk about our country being a Republic and prefer to talk about it as a democracy or a representative democracy? It is because in democracy the government is determined by the people collectively or the majority of the people. In a Republic, we turn to our Constitution. There may, at any given time, be a majority of people in this body or a majority of people in this country who don't like a given religion, or they feel like we can confiscate people's property, or because there has been a shooting on the news the night before, they want to ignore the Second Amendment. Therefore, they might not like certain religions and want to suppress that religion. They might not like certain ideas, and they want to say that they were elected here, so they can suppress those ideas. There are two examples I would like to share with this body. There was a bill called the McCain-Feingold Act that was passed by two popular Congressmen around the year 2000. They wanted to restrict what people could say or how much time people could buy in an election. In other words, they wanted to restrict the freedom of speech. I am sure both politicians at that time felt we are very popular. We have been elected several times. We have the right to trample on somebody's free speech. Certainly, in an election season, I would like there to be less or would prefer there to be less advertisements, less mailing going on. The McCain-Feingold Act passed. The Supreme Court at the time had to lecture, in essence, Senator Feingold and Senator McCain that we do not live in a democracy. We don't care if you receive 60 or 65 percent of the vote in your district. You do not have the right to say certain people cannot buy time on television or send out mailings. Another example, there was a very popular Governor in the State of Wisconsin. I think very highly of the man. He wanted to say if you have property along a State highway, we can restrict what you can do on that property because someday we might want to buy that property when this highway goes from a two-lane to a four-lane highway. Therefore, we will make your front 50 feet or 60 feet along the highway less valuable because, after all, we represent the government. We have been elected overwhelmingly. The implication is this is a democracy, and we can take your property from you. Again, the State Supreme Court had to say that, hey, wait a minute. We don't have a democracy here. We have a Republic. We don't care how popular you are. You cannot interfere with what people can do with their land along a highway. It is another example in which politicians wished we had a democracy or a representative democracy so they can tell you what you can do with your property. In fact, our Constitution stood tall and said that we don't care how you were elected or how many people voted for you, we will not allow you to take people's property. I believe that is why politicians like to talk about democracy. Because they received 70 percent or 51 percent around here, they like to believe they can determine what you can and cannot say. As we continue throughout this biennium, let us try not to refer to our form of government as a democracy. Let's refer to it as James Madison or Ben Franklin would have liked to have us refer to it. What they gave us was a republic under our wonderful, great Constitution. Even though our Constitution allows people to say things we might disagree with, even though our Constitution allows us to quote our wonderful Holy Bible, even though our Constitution prevents the government from taking people's property without the Constitution, even though our Constitution allows the carrying or owning of firearms, when a lot of people around here don't think we should have the right to carry those firearms, let us stand with our Republic and, bravely, just like when we say the Pledge of Allegiance, bravely describe our country as a Republic, not a democracy. Again, James Madison said, democracies are spectacles of turbulence and contention; have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been short in their lives. Now, I think during the past month or whatever it was we were not in Washington, a couple of prominent Americans took aim at our Constitution. In particular, they didn't like the First Amendment. They didn't like that people were out there, saying things that they disagreed with. These former politicians both almost became the President of the United States, which shows how precarious our hold on our great Republic is. I am talking, in part, about Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady but, even worse, former Secretary of State, who almost became President of the United States. She talked about social media companies and said they must moderate content on their platforms or we will lose total control. In other words, Hillary Clinton felt that the government should control our lives and they didn't like social media companies allowing things to seep out into the zeitgeist. Maybe those things were hostile to what Hillary felt. It is kind of hard to believe she almost became President. She should always be remembered as someone who believed the First Amendment caused the government to lose control. While we were out on recess, John Kerry, another man who almost became President of the United States, called the First Amendment a major block in combating misinformation and fighting climate control. Of course, there is a disagreement with regard to climate change, where it comes from, if it is happening, but John Kerry felt the way to deal with this issue was apparently to deal with the First Amendment. What he was doing here was talking to the World Economic Forum in a panel on green energy. John Kerry was not only trying to trample on the First Amendment rights of Americans; he wanted this idea to spread throughout the world. Can you imagine if he had ever become President of the United States, a man who called the First Amendment a major block? My goodness. This is what is going on, and the American public has to wake up. During this time, there was also a letter made public by Mark Zuckerberg, one of the wealthiest men in America. You would think the wealthiest people in America above all would have the freedom to exercise their First Amendment rights. Apparently not. The Biden administration weighed in with Mark Zuckerberg. They didn't like it that people out there had different opinions about COVID, how to address it, and what was appropriate. The Biden administration apparently contacted Mark Zuckerberg and his group, saying that maybe there were things that the American public should know. In other words, rather than having a free exchange of ideas on the value of the vaccine or the value of social distancing or whatever, we shouldn't have an open exchange of ideas. It would be better if we didn't have that pesky First Amendment. It would be better if the people who know best-- Anthony Fauci or Pfizer, say--that we should just defer to them because we all know how important Pfizer is. They certainly give a lot of campaign contributions, which we politicians like. Therefore, we should weigh in on the social media platforms and say there are some things that are inconvenient to the country. I hope when we return we do something to put a little more energy in that First Amendment and, above all, educate the American public that there are politicians out there--like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or, apparently, Joe Biden--who view the First Amendment as an obstacle in their expansion of government. I think this has, to a certain extent, been commented on, but not commented on enough because too many important people--and here we are talking about one President and two almost Presidents--wanted to end people's First Amendment rights. The First Amendment is only one of the things that make America so great. Others are, I think, things referred to by Nikita Khrushchev and other Communists who, at the time, wanted governments the exact opposite of what we have. We have a free country based on a republic and our Constitution and anticipated to be a country for moral and religious people. Under communism, we had a country aiming for atheism and totalitarianism in which a government elite decides who we can work for, what goods are to be produced, and the degree to which we penalize people who say things that are not appropriately in line with what the government wants. In any event, Nikita Khrushchev--in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union was kind of the center of communism--promised to someday take over the United States. They would take over the United States without firing a shot. We spend a great deal around here on munitions, submarines, tanks, and airplanes, but it was interesting that at one time the Communists-- and I think Nikita Khrushchev was speaking for the Communists--felt they would take over this country without firing a shot. What evidence is there that they are trying to weaken our country? I think in addition to the fact that they want to chip away at the First Amendment, I think there is hostility to families, old-fashioned nuclear families, going on in this country. How are we trying to chip away at the families? After all, people like Karl Marx did not like the family. One way to look at it is that there are currently over 90 programs in the United States in which the benefits of those programs depend on something referred to as percent of poverty. A percent of poverty calculation penalizes two-parent families, or at least it penalizes two-parent families if at least one of them is working a full-time job. In other words, it encourages one-parent families. I, and probably most of the people in this institution, were around in 1965. Back at that time, only 5 percent of the children born in this country were born into families who did not have both a mother and father at home. Over time, we have built up over 90 programs in which it was difficult for this family to form. In other words, you get more money right away if you have a family in which only one parent was there. We have worked our way up to a situation where the child is born without both parents at home in over 40 percent of families. Normally, this means it is a fatherless family. In other words, the government, which is supposed to treat everybody equally, if you have a scale out there, it is overwhelmingly trying to create an America in which the old-fashioned family is becoming more obsolete. I should point out that this has gone, like I said, from 5 percent to 40 percent. Programs that these families are eligible for are things like SNAP or the Food Stamp program, the low-income housing program, the earned income tax program, the Medicaid healthcare program, things like the Pell Grant Program, TANF program cash assistance, SSI disability program for the children all are inducements not to form an old-fashioned family. Every biennium--last time, Joe Biden's final budget request--the government usually puts new programs on the heap or adds money to old programs to make the gap between somebody who decides to have both parents in the house compared to somebody who has only one parent in the house. One person who has written very eloquently on this hasn't been listened to as much as he should--Robert Rector is one--is George Gilder, who wrote a bestseller in 1980. I know there was anticipation that Ronald Reagan would act on this book. He was not able to act on it--my guess is primarily because the Republican House was always in the minority at that time. George Gilder used to look at what normally I refer to as slums or low-income areas of the city. He focused on Albany, New York, and he followed around a young couple where the young lady was pregnant. To his surprise, it was not cause for concern like it has been throughout all of history when a young girl gets pregnant and isn't married. Rather, it was a cause for celebration, as the gleeful new couple went around from the low-income housing people to the food stamp people, to the Medicaid people, and signed up for all sorts of benefits. At the time, they had something called AFDC cash payments. It was a cause for celebration because now the young lady would not have to live with her parents anymore. She was getting her own place. I am sure the people who devised these programs were primarily a money-oriented group, and they felt that this new program would be more likely to have the young lady live on her own without having to live with her mother or with her parents, so they felt they were doing something good. I think, over time, given the hostility of Karl Marx, given the hostility to the radicals even in the 1960s and 1970s, there were people who knew exactly what they were doing as they destroyed the nuclear family in parts of America. In any event, this is something we have to look at. When you combine Federal programs with State programs, which frequently team up with Federal programs, you can have situations in which there are $20,000, $30,000, $35,000 penalties for people who decide to get married rather than have people live with a single mother. It is not like single mothers cannot be very good parents. It is not hard to find people who have been raised in single-parent families who are wonderful children. On the other hand, it is tougher. Statistics would show that it is tougher. In America, where we try to keep everybody equal, we should not continue to have programs which kind of push more and more people into that single-family situation. I saw George Gilder weighing in on a topic just the other day. Like I said, he wrote a great bestseller called ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980, and he is still around. He made the case that not only is this bad for the children, but it is bad for the men because you create swaths of society in which men have no purpose because, traditionally, the purpose in an old-fashioned nuclear family is to be the breadwinner. Here, we have a situation in which he is not going to be able to make enough money, in many cases, to match the government. As a result, we have a situation in which the mother marries the government rather than the husband, and in the long run, it hurts the husband as well. I hope that this Congress, with such high hopes, works to take away this marriage penalty. Regardless of what Karl Marx would have said, regardless of what certain radical groups would say, we do not want to penalize the father for becoming part of that household. We know these people are still around. I mentioned, again, Black Lives Matter, a group which many people in this institution were not afraid to stand with, coming out against the traditional nuclear family. It didn't cause people to run away from that group. There are other quotes of radicals, Angela Davis, that crowd, over the last 50 years, which, again, are hostile to the nuclear family, making fun of the nuclear family, a preference for single parenthood. I hope this Congress begins to chip away at that ideal. We do not want to any longer have people penalized for getting married and trying to form a traditional family. Indeed, we ought to be encouraging that. It didn't work out as well as people wanted, but the next attack on freedoms that I think our forefathers would not have seen is congressional programs or programs created by Congress or the executive branch trying to treat people differently by sex or race. These are sometimes referred to as affirmative action programs, but there are many other ways to refer to the programs. The idea is that the government ought to aim programs at certain subgroups of society, that we have to weigh in to have a disproportionate number of women in a program compared to the women who want to be in the program, a disproportionate number by ancestry. Be it Asian American, African American, so-called Hispanic American, Pacific Islander, or North African, the government should be favoring people by the group that they are from. This is another thing our forefathers would have been opposed to. They wanted to treat all Americans equally. They did not want the government to have our elections become a contest between ethnic groups. They did not want our government programs to be a contest between men and women as the government weighs in, as they do today, on who owns companies that get government contracts. If you get a government contract, the government wants to know which ethnic group you are. Of course, you self-identify, so because you are one-quarter Hispanic or one-quarter Native American, you should get preferences to a program. Of course, they don't care here on amount of wealth, so you are going to have a situation in which, say, an Asian American worth tens of millions of dollars gets preference on a government contract compared to a poor person of European descent, a poor guy. The problem is not just the preferences, which are unfair in its own right, it does result--soon, we are going to have a bill around here--a lot more the government-at-large has to take care of with the problems caused by the hurricanes. That just results in additional cost, maybe quality, but certainly cost, depending upon who gets the project, but it creates animosity. It creates an America in which people do not say: I want to have the best person for this program. Every government program, every government hiring decision becomes a contest between men and women, or a contest between Hispanic or Asian or what have you. It is a kind of ridiculous contest because America is so nonracist in the first place, but that is what we have going on in the program. We have got to save some money by getting rid of these bureaucrats. We ought to realize that the purpose of these programs is to divide America. There is a book out--I don't know if it is okay to use a picture of a book here--but it is called, ``America's Cultural Revolution,'' by Christopher Rufo. In this book, he points out that this idea of breaking apart America by racial groups would be a way to destroy America. There was a Communist by the name of Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse, who was very powerful in the late sixties and early seventies. At that time, the Communist element, the Progressive element, has always wanted to fundamentally change America. They were hoping to change America by dividing America by wealth, and they wanted Americans to be bitter and angry because some people lived in a nice house or had a big bank account. They felt they could rile people up and make them mad and bring out their worst emotions and create a revolution in America. They failed. In the late sixties and early seventies, there were a lot of bombings, there were a lot of riots, but America was still a country at heart that was proud to be American. They realized anybody in America could realize the American Dream if they were willing to work hard. The Progressives failed in the late sixties and early seventies to divide America by bitterness, by economic divide. As a fallback position, they felt that maybe we can divide America by race, maybe we can create bitterness and anger if we persuade people America is a horrible racist country. That is what they talk about in ``America's Cultural Revolution,'' the desire to destroy America because we want most Americans bitter and angry and thinking that we have a racist country. We have to get rid of the people who are pushing this division, whether they are an American business, in academia, in government, a lot of times they are referred to as DEI specialists. The purpose of these people is to divide America and tell people America is a horrible, racist country. It is on its face, by the way, absurd. I mean, the wealthiest subgroup in America today is Indian Americans. They do not look European in nature. Many of them come here not knowing how to speak English. Most of them who come here are not Christian. If the people are right that America is a horrible, racist country, that they discriminate against people, these people would not be able to rise to the level they have. If you look at the other wealthiest Americans, almost none of them are White and of European descent: Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Cuban Americans, second-generation African Americans all outperform native persons. Nevertheless, this evil group of DEI people who administer these programs use their positions to try to create resentment in America. It should be a goal to cause Herbert Marcuse's successors to fail. We have got to do all we can to get rid of these DEI specialists who encourage hate, encourage racism, encourage resentment, spread a myth that we have a big white supremacist problem. There is no way, when we get down with the next level of appropriation bills that this government--which is broke out of its mind--ought to still have any bureaucrats who make this pitch throughout America. Of course, during the campaign, you will notice--some Republicans fall guilty of this as well--there are campaign promises aimed at individual ethnic groups rather than treating all Americans as one. This is not something we had to do 20 or 30 years ago. It is obvious that Herbert Marcuse Communists or radical socialists have achieved his goal in that at least one political party plans to maintain power by putting programs out there that benefit one ethnic group over another ethnic group or promises financial benefits if you belong to one group over another group. Fortunately, so far, they haven't had a huge amount of success, but if you talk around, they have made some progress in persuading some people that we have a huge problem in society. In any event, certainly an immediate goal for this institution is to get rid of anybody preaching that DEI nonsense, certainly anybody whose position in our government is to encourage their horrible philosophy. In any event, there are some comments on what is going on in America. Just to summarize again, I think we have to provide a little bit more oomph behind our First Amendment so that people like Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or Joseph Biden are pushed to the dustbin of history if they decide to attack it or feel that is part of our problem. I think we have to be very careful to not discourage the formation of two-parent families like we have in the last 60 years. I think we have to get rid of the bureaucracy, which is growing up, which tries to divide America by ethnic background, is something else that I think has to be done. We have to educate our young people that we do not have a democracy. James Madison and our forefathers would be shocked and stunned and disappointed if this land, which they had founded, had twisted itself all around, abandoned our respect for our Constitution, the Republic, and instead was teaching our young ones that we had a democracy, including some of the people with the greatest positions up here. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, it is great to be back on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. We wrapped up our election season last Tuesday. I participated in debates. Other people participated in debates. We are all ready to go after that inflation, that inflation driving up food costs, driving up housing costs, driving up the cost of gasoline. We are ready to get back here and be a little responsible. Mr. Speaker, what is the first bill up, the first bill on the first day? It is a bill that is going to cost just short of $200 billion, not cut $200 billion, as we try to strengthen the dollar. It is going to cost $200 billion. It is illuminating that the most cosponsored bill is a bill that will add another $200 billion to the country's debt, but that is the situation that we are in. Mr. Speaker, let's forget about the flowery language here. Now is the first opportunity to say no to spending. I was anticipating this biennium. We fight over bills worth $500 million or $1 billion. Now, we have a bill before us for $190 billion, and everyone says it is time to, in a bipartisan way, spend more. The average American is already $100,000 in debt. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to please remember the promises about excessive spending that we were all saying just 2 weeks ago and please vote against this bill. I don't know what is going to happen to me if the first thing the Republicans do after coming back after this election season is pass a bill that is going to cost $200 billion. Remember, the current system is built to provide a benefit for the low earner. These folks already have a pension and knew what the situation was going to be. Please don't spend $200 billion.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Wisconsin, the Honorable Tony Wied, be permitted to take the oath of office today. His certificate of election has not arrived, but there is no contest and no question has been raised with regard to his election.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the newest member of the Wisconsin delegation, Tony Wied, on being sworn in this evening. Tony joins our delegation with an impressive three-decade career of starting, building, and running three retail outlets in northeast Wisconsin, including Dino Stop locations in Green Bay, Ledgeview, Manitowoc, New Franken, Little Suamico, and Abrams. Through his years in business, Tony has learned a lot about the value of hard work, strong customer service, and uniting people around a common mission. Tony has employed hundreds of Wisconsinites over the years and now brings that same commonsense business acumen to this body, where it is greatly needed. We need more people dealing with the common sense that requires you to be a small businessman, and he is going to help the everyday Americans pursue the American Dream. Mr. Speaker, once again, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Tony; his wife, Angela; and his four sons: Charlie, Frank, George, and Simon on this momentous occasion. I certainly had a chance to see his four sons on the campaign trail. They are like a whirlwind across northeastern Wisconsin. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Wied).