Glenn Grothman

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx).

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I call attention one more time to the Members of this body about the lack of respect for the Second Amendment that took place in the State of New Mexico recently. We all know where the increase in crime rate came from; probably three things: first of all, the breakdown of the family, which was encouraged by Lyndon Johnson's war on the family; secondly, liberal judges, who are not predisposed to put criminals in jail; and finally, liberal district attorneys who do not want to put members of the criminal class in jail. As a result, we wind up with an increase in murders and an increase in crimes committed with guns. We have to rally and make it impossible, politically impossible, for anybody else to do what the New Mexico Governor did a few weeks ago. The Second Amendment is designed to keep the power in this country with the people. Just because we have a family breakdown, together with ultra leftwing judges and district attorneys, is no reason to give up on our Second Amendment. Rally, America. Rally around that Second Amendment.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I think probably the single most important thing done in this body is when we uphold our oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. I, therefore, would bring to the attention of the body two instances while we were on break in which the Constitution was under attack, and I don't think enough Americans know about it. One of the things was in the State of New Mexico, the Governor of New Mexico decided to declare war on the Second Amendment on the grounds that there was an uptick or maybe a big increase in murder in the Albuquerque area. The Second Amendment is absolute. We don't get rid of the Second Amendment if the murder rate is up 30 percent. The reason we don't get rid of it is our Forefathers wanted the power to be with the people, not the government. But it is particularly ridiculous in that it is obvious why we have had an uptick in murder in the last 3 years in this country. I think there are three obvious reasons. One, the government is mucking around where they shouldn't, as was mentioned by the founders of Black Lives Matter. People around here wanted to disrupt what they refer to as the Western-prescribed nuclear family. In other words, they want to get the man out of the household. We also have people trying to elect district attorneys who don't like to put people in jail, judges who don't like to put people in jail, and antipolice forces who make the police timid. When all these things get done, you wind up having an increase in murder. I would point out that John Adams said that America was built for a moral and religious people. We have to get back to that moral and religious people so they don't abuse their right to guns. In the interim, the idea of leaving guns in the hands of the lawbreakers, which of course is what will happen, and taking guns from the people who are law abiding could not be worse. It is almost hard to believe that at this time in our history we have a Governor--a lawyer no less-- who wants to enact a law, taking away the guns from the law abiding but presumably leaving in place the policies which resulted in increase in murder in the first place by not taking action against the type of people who are breaking the law. The Second Amendment was under attack. A decision was made in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in which the Biden administration had tried to weigh in on social platforms that were giving a narrative of the COVID epidemic that was not in line with what Pfizer and their political allies wanted to say. We have a First Amendment in this country, and we expect decisions to be made based upon a free exchange of ideas. We beat people in the court of public opinion. We don't say the government shouldn't weigh in and say we are not going to let people who disagree with us have a public platform. The Biden administration chafes at the idea of free speech. They wanted to get only their way in dealing with the pandemic, and they decided to restrict free speech here in America. That should scare everyone to death, that we elected a President of the United States who wanted to restrict free speech. Another thing that really concerned me about that, in an article by The New York Times, which I think is still viewed as an important paper by some people in this body, said the Court decision, which was a slap down of the Biden administration, was a victory for conservatives. In other words, today, the people who write for The New York Times have said that upholding free speech is something conservatives do, implying it is not something that progressives or Democrats or liberals, or whatever, do. This is a scary thing. When I was very young, I was a Democrat, believe it or not. At that time the Democrats were perceived I think even more boldly in favor of free speech than Republicans. So everybody was in favor of free speech. Nobody disagreed with the First Amendment. Now, we have a decision in which truly the paper of record of leftwing America is saying that when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds free speech or slaps down the Biden administration for trying to restrict free speech, that is a victory for conservatives, implying it is a defeat for the progressives. Think about that. I hope The New York Times reconsiders its position and does some sort of apology to America and say that they are going to try to do what they can to make progressives or the left, or whatever, advocates for free speech again. In any event, we have two examples of the Constitution under attack. I hope the public demands that we stand united behind the First and Second Amendment.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, today we return from about a 6-week sabbatical back in our districts. I would like to address some more evidence of the moral decline that is coming over our country. I am talking about the cities, including Columbus, Seattle, Milwaukee, and New York, that are suing Kia and Hyundai because of car thefts in their district. They are not blaming the breakdown in the families encouraged by the government, not blaming the weak DAs they elect, not blaming the weak judges they elect. They are blaming the car companies. How must we look to the South Koreans when they pick up their newspaper and find out the Americans are suing their car companies because our young people can't be prevented from taking them? Wake up, America. Please stop this horrible moral decline before it is too late. Please, please, American cities, don't sue car companies anymore because we are doing such a bad job of raising the young generation.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we have a few issues that ought to be debated on the floor and brought to the attention of the news media to help them with articles that would educate the American public a little bit on issues of importance. I haven't spoken on Ukraine lately, but I will point out that Congress has not received a briefing on what is going on in Ukraine since December. That is way too long to go on the first significant land war in Europe in over 70 years. I ask the Biden administration to send its officials over to allow Members of Congress to at least get their opinion as far as what is going on. As I have said before, this war should not be that difficult to end. Ukraine has the second lowest birthrate in the world. The Ukrainians, who have such a shortage of young people, should be especially ready to end this war. The Russians also have a low birthrate, and even prior to the war a lot of young Russians were emigrating. Over 2 years ago, before the war started, I was in San Diego, and in the San Diego sector the Border Patrol and the immigration folks told me during the prior 2 weeks or month or whatever, in that segment, only in the San Diego segment, the second largest nationality to be crossing into America was Russian. You have two countries with shortages of people. It should be ripe for reaching some sort of settlement. I think the United States is perceived to be, maybe rightfully so, overly partisan in this war, but somehow we should be prodding the Israelis or Turks or French or somebody to reach a conclusion here, for one, on humanitarian terms. I mean, for whatever reason, it is hard to find exact numbers of people who died in this war. I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war. They could give you the number of Americans who died right down to the individual digit, but for some reason you get wildly different numbers on the number of people who have died in this conflict. However, either way, there are a significant number of people dying, and the Biden administration should be looking for a way to wrap it up. It wasn't that long ago that we seemed to have good relations with both of these countries. The longer it drags on, the more we drive Russia into the arms of China, which isn't in anybody's best interests, and it is a little frustrating that we are not getting a rationalization by the Biden administration why we wouldn't try to end this. The American press maybe ought to spend a little bit of time asking the Biden administration whether they feel there is any end to this war. In any event, I call on the Biden administration to give us a new update in the auditorium, and I call on the press corps to start asking, is there any time when we are going to end this war. The next issue I think I should bring up, because they keep talking about it on the news without giving us any new information, is the transgender situation. Usually when we talk about it, we talk about it with regard to biological men going into the women's locker room or biological men competing in women's sports. However, I think a more significant question is: Why are there apparently more transgender people now than during the rest of my life? It seems to me the Europeans have reached the conclusion that one of the reasons for this wave of transgenderism is, people keep talking about it on TV and in academic settings. The more one talks about it, the more people begin to think that this is perhaps the route they should go. I talked to someone about a month ago, 6 weeks ago, who, I guess I will call a recovering transgender, a woman, who now regrets it. She had the surgery, breasts removed at age 15, the whole ball of wax. It is not something that would have occurred to her, but she found something on the internet which informed her that maybe the reason she was unhappy is that she really was a boy. She went down the path. She went to the gender reassignment doctors, who apparently make a living on this. They talked her into the idea that, yes, the reason she was an unhappy little 13-year-old girl is because she was really a boy. She went through testosterone treatments, puberty blockers, and eventually even had her breasts cut out, which is a true tragedy, and now she regrets it. I think the thing we ought to take out of it--and I have read this in another places, as well--people who are-- nobody should ever be mean or that sort of thing, but people who are overly solicitous or overly accepting of this transgender lifestyle wind up encouraging more people, other people to adapt this lifestyle. Every study out there shows these people wind up very, very, very unhappy and miserable, and sometimes even wind up committing suicide. So I would hope that the American press corps would put a new narrative out there rather than just persuading people that this is all a positive development. They ought to take about where people wind up who wind up going through the surgery. They ought to spend a little bit of time talking about why it appears there are so many more transgender people today than there were 30 years ago, and the answer is obvious. It is presented favorably as a lifestyle for a lot of young people, and when it is presented favorably, a number of young people get on the internet, read about it, decide to adapt this lifestyle, which is obviously only going to lead to misery and which does lead into misery. I would ask the press corps to be a little bit more open-minded or publish a little bit more as to why we seem to have more transgenders than the pass. Is it like the Europeans have discovered, a matter of the more we talk about it the more we have people like this. Maybe then we will realize that the goal should not be to have dramatic surgeries on young people's bodies. The goal should be on pushing this kind of to the side and not have so many people adapt the transgender lifestyle in the first place. The next topic I am going to take up, which we haven't taken up this session, but I think should be taken up next session or sometime in the near future because it has such a big influence on America is that of the breakdown of the family and the lack of fathers in homes, which is bad, not only for the children, but it is bad for the father, as well. In the 1960s, in which I think it was maybe the biggest domestic policy blunder in this country's history, under Lyndon Johnson, tons of money was aimed at families with children, but because the percent of poverty was determined by your income level as a practical matter, this money was conditioned upon not having a man in the household. In other words, if you had mother and father both working in the household, by definition, they were not in poverty. But if father was somewhere else and mother was alone, say, with two or three kids, and mother did not have a job, she was considered in poverty. This program said that if you are in poverty, or the programs, the Great Society, as it was called then--they should have called it the war on marriage--under the war on marriage, people who did not get married were given free housing at the time. So then they dialed back a little, given a check. They were given free food. They could be given free education. They would be given free medical care and given all these free things. Basically what they did is they set up the family without a dad as a self-contained unit. Only 7 percent of the births in the United States at the beginning of the sixties were born without a mother and a father in the home. Now, we are over 40 percent. I think, well, there are parents of all backgrounds doing yeoman's work, doing a tremendous job raising their children, and we don't want to denigrate them at all. But the statistics would show that whether you are looking at crime rates or educational achievement, depression, children, in general, are happier with both parents in the home because not everybody is up to raising kids in that environment. You would have to be blind not to realize the reason we have gone from 7 percent to over 40 percent is the great society and all these programs in which to get benefits, or you do get benefits if both parents are not around, and almost always that means the man is not around. Other programs like earned income tax credit, which was, I think, not a very good program thought up by the Republicans and Jack Kemp, were also conditioned upon getting the check. You don't want to have two parents working in the household. I would hope that we would do a subcommittee or something on this problem, get back to the good old days where depression and youth suicide was less than it is today, drug use a fraction of what it is today and, in order to do that, we have to change the incentives that were put into place by Lyndon Johnson. This, by the way, was known by the end of the 1960s. I hate to cite this study because it is so overcited, but Patrick Moynihan, by the late sixties, had pointed out what a disaster it was to have incentives in which the father wasn't in the home. So this is not new things I am talking about today. We knew this was a mistake by 1967, by 1968, by 1969, but Congress, either because they did not have the will, or because there is a radical element that Black Lives Matter represents, in which an element, a Marxist element wants to get rid of what they call the western prescribed nuclear family, and this is certainly a way to do it, but, for whatever reason, we have not adequately changed incentives in the 1960s. Made a little think to the right direction under Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, but since then it has all been downhill. I think we have to ask ourselves, was it a good idea to do all we could to set up the single parent as the sole parent in a child's life. I realize this is little bit different than a divorce situation, a little bit different than a widow situation, but there is no question there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of men in children's lives beginning in the 1960s. I want to point to something else, too, about this issue that a lot of times people don't take into account. This is something that George Gilder, who was a great sociologist--he is still alive today--but he wrote a book called ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980. At the time Ronald Reagan was sworn in, the book received a lot of positive press at that time. It has now been forgotten. What Gilder pointed out is not only are two parents important for the child but it is also important for the man because a lot of times the man's self-worth comes from--just like the woman's self-worth--comes from raising children. It is the most important thing in life. As a result of all these welfare programs in the 1960s, you have a lot of families without men in the household; the man had no purpose. This is why I think you see so much crime lately, so much drug abuse, because I think a lot of these men who were supposed to get self-worth out of children have kind of been kicked out of their home. If they actually did try to work and support their family, they may be materially less well off, or their children would be materially less well off than if dad wasn't around at all. Like I said, that goes for all the different benefits. There is a benefit called section 42 housing in which people taking advantage of section 42 housing, not only do you have to be in poverty to get it, but section 42 housing is frequently superior in quality to what people who are not on government programs get. Because section 42 housing is usually very new housing because the government pays for so much of the housing or to build the housing, people build section 42 low-income housing nicer than regular old apartments that are being built now; but that would be an example of a bad program that has bad results. The next topic that I would like to take up, the final topic, which I seem to address every week, but I think we should address again, because every one of these appropriation bills that comes before this place is subject to debate, either on this floor or in the Rules Committee, with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This country has, for the last 50 years, at least with regard to universities--it looks like it is going to end or to a degree end because of a recent court decision. For 50 years, we have had programs designed to hire people or promote people or fire people or let people into colleges and universities or give businesses government contracts based on people's race and gender too. There are two rationalizations for this, but the press never spends any time determining whether these rationalizations are right or wrong. One rationalization is that certain groups of people were discriminated against all the way back to slavery days, and, more recently, Jim Crow, that sort of thing. The other rationalization is that in a workplace setting, diversity is a good thing and that we should, therefore, force or mandate businesses to hire people based on where their ancestors came from 200 years ago. First of all, the idea that we owe people something--when you look at the people who are beneficiaries of these programs, many of them do not have any ancestors who were in America prior to the institution of these programs. If somebody, say, who is Black from Jamaica immigrates to the United States in 1965, after Jim Crow ended, well after slavery, is there any reason why that person should receive preference? Recently, the Biden administration has tried to give preferences to what they call North African or Middle Eastern people. So if I come here from Egypt or Syria or Algeria today, and I am not even a citizen, according to the Biden administration, we should make sure--kind of weigh in on companies, universities I think they would like to weigh in on admissions, and make sure we give preferences to people from Algeria or Syria who are not even in this country yet. I don't know why we don't have that debate. We also ought to have a debate whether we ought to add a new so-called minority group of North Africans and Middle Easterners. With regard to diversity, I think we also have a problem. I guess the idea behind diversity is a pure racist would say that someone's view of the world or the way they tackle a job is going to be dependent upon where their great-great-great-great-grandparents came from. Now, I reject that idea. The idea that if I were to--I am not--but the idea that if I had a great-grandparent who was born in Peru, I would have a different view of the world than my next-door neighbor whose great-grandparents were from Germany. That is kind of a racist thing on its face, but that is what the diversity argument boils down to, that we should look at people, not on their viewpoint today, not on their personal experiences to this point in life. If we have two people who both grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in houses next to each other, and one was one-quarter Mexican and one wasn't Mexican, that they would carry different viewpoints into the workplace, and it was important to get both viewpoints, even though, perhaps the person from Latin America had never been to a Latin American country in their life. But the idea behind this program--and, by the way, you self-identify as to what your group is--the idea behind the program is it is important to get the viewpoint of somebody whose grandfather or great- grandfather happened to be from a different country. Again, even though in the case, say, of a Latin American, people would not even know that that is true. But this is a rationalization used for these rather high-handed programs that, as a practical matter, causes both the government people who are hiring and the businesses who do business with the government to hire based on ancestry. I want to point out that I was actually talking to somebody from India today--of Indian ancestry. He wondered about this program because he was from India, and in India there are many different subgroups that sometimes don't get along. He thought the United States was alone in that we got along so well and it was such a wonderful thing we have going here, why in the world with us getting along so well would we try to duplicate countries like Nigeria or Sri Lanka or Iraq? Why would we try to duplicate what they are doing in other countries where the elections are contests between ethnic groups? These diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are designed to cause people not to view themselves as an American but view themselves as a Cuban American or a Mexican American or an Asian American or a Pacific Islander. In other words, they are going to view themselves when they vote and at other times as a representative of where their ancestors came from perhaps even decades, if not, centuries ago. I am afraid one of the reasons for these programs I ran across recently, I heard of someone who--I don't really like the phrase, but would today be considered by people who are proponents of these programs as a person of color--and this person, because they were from south of the border, their employer, once they asked them where their ancestry was--before I was in an elected position, the places that I worked, we never asked people where their ancestry was, but nowadays we ask them--and this large employer decided to hold breakout groups of people based on their ethnicity. We are going to have the Black group meet over there and the Hispanic group meet over there and the Asian group meet over there, and what happened is the diversity consultant--an occupation which shouldn't exist in America, by the way--the diversity consultant tried to tell this person that they were put upon and how they should think because they had an ancestor from south of the border. Now think how ridiculous that is. This person, who was just a fine, regular American never viewed themselves any different from anybody else, is being told because of where their ancestors came from, south of the border, that they ought to have certain beliefs, including certain political beliefs, which I think is the reason why the Biden administration is pushing this sort of thing. They want to tell people that if you are from Mexico or you are from Colombia or you are from Nigeria or you are from India that you are put upon and that you ought to have certain political beliefs. It is better to cut this thing right away. We have a shortage of people, workers in this country. The idea that we have people going to college to be diversity experts is appalling. I am glad my colleagues again and again are trying to take these diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats out of the Federal bureaucracy, but there are way too many of them in the bureaucracy of individual big businesses around the country. It is the wimps who run these big businesses who feel that they have to kowtow to the diversity lobby, the special interest group, and they are instituting these programs by themselves. I think it is time we had a public discussion here as to whether this whole diversity, equity, inclusion thing makes any sense. I can go through topics that should be brought up by talk show hosts, by service clubs, what have you. Should we identify people by where their ancestors came from? If they self-identify, should we be identifying people by where their great- grandmother or great-grandfather came from? That is an interesting question. If we are going to give preferences based upon where your great- great-grandfather is from, should we see if there is any true diversity there before you say you should take my contract ahead of the other guy's contract or you should hire me ahead of the other guy? Tell us what you bring to the table because your great-great-grandmother was from Mexico. How do you think different than the other guy? Let's have that discussion. We are not having that discussion. Should you, again, be able to self-identify? If I am seven-eighths German and one-eighth Mexican, is it right that on the form I can put down that I am a Mexican and I should be able to say I bring the view of Mexican Americans to my engineering firm? They can also talk about, in certain jobs, what is the benefit of diversity? If we are talking about an engineering job, is the way I engineer the building of a bridge any different because I am one- quarter Mexican? That doesn't make any sense, but that is the position of the people who push these programs. Let's have a discussion on that. Another discussion is, before we get this divisiveness going on forever, how long is this going to happen? This began in earnest--I think under John Kennedy, but it really began in earnest under Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and at the time I am sure nobody in a million years dreamed that we would still have this stuff almost 67 years later. Should we have a discussion? How long are we going to do this? Again, let's have a discussion. If part of this is supposed to be a way to make up for past sins, why are we giving benefits here to people who may not even be citizens yet? Why are we giving benefits to people who just moved here from Syria? Should that be considered a different sort of person subject to benefits? Let's have a discussion there. In any event, I hope as we write more and more about the Supreme Court case and preferences in college admissions, I hope people begin to ask some of these questions as to whether or not they make any sense at all whatsoever. I leave here hoping that our news media and this Congress spend a little more time updating themselves on what is going on in Ukraine. I hope they spend a little bit more time wondering as to whether we have this transgender crisis even a little bit. Just because we talk about it, if we weren't talking about it so much, we would have a fraction of the number of transgenders in the first place. I think we should spend some time looking at the premise that the diversity, equity, and inclusion is built upon and answering questions like, should we be adding Egyptians and Syrians to the mix? Should I be able to label myself a minority if I am one-quarter a minority? Should I be able to label myself picked upon if my parents have given me $5 million? These are questions that should be asked on the diversity level. I think we should be asking is it time to stop government programs which have resulted in an increase in fatherlessness from 7 to 40 percent, programs I think which hurt people, and particularly hurt men, have been around since the 1960s. There is no reason for these programs to continue forever. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I also rise today to comment on the two appropriations bills before the House this week and to point out that I would like to thank the Appropriations Committee for doing a good job on both bills. We are going to take up, this week, the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act and the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. I am proud to say that the U.S. has the strongest military in the world, but I recently ran into someone on break and heard about the horrible conditions, almost embarrassing conditions--you have to kind of wonder about the military--that they had to live in. In any event, when we put together this bill, we had to make sure that the living conditions for the military were such that they are, first of all, appropriate for such brave fighting men and women, and, secondly, that we continue to attract and retain our people who signed up for the military. It is apparent, therefore, that of all the appropriations bills that will come up, the military construction and veterans affairs bill, contrary to what we have been hearing around here in partisan attacks, does contain an increase in funding over last year's bill--just about the only segment of the government that does. Meanwhile, I am glad to say that the agriculture bill contains a significant reduction over last year. Why do we have to spend less? For one thing because the excessive spending is where the inflation comes from. With too many dollars sloshing around the U.S. economy, those dollars have led to the spiraling, out-of-control cost of housing and the out-of-control cost of automobiles. The Republicans have done a good job of, at least with regard to discretionary spending, finally saying we should have a year in which the overall level of spending is going down. First of all, I would like to point out some of the things that are funded in the agriculture bill. We continue to have critical investments in agriculture research and rural broadband. I will tell you, I have a rural state. I have 10 counties. When I show up at my town's association, again and again, I hear about the need for more rural broadband for health purposes and also to keep up- to-date on all research and anything else that we have to do to help people in the rural areas. I am also glad that we are going to prevent the purchase of agricultural land from foreign countries that will inevitably lead to a loss in this country of our sovereignty. We are going to, even more importantly, eliminate the USDA's diversity, equity, and inclusion office, which I think requires a little bit more of a discussion. It is not that huge of an office, but I think the effort of President Biden to continue to emphasize this equity, diversity, is misplaced. The goal of these offices is to, I think, encourage people to view people by where their ancestors came from, not where they are now. Their goal is clearly to persuade the American public that we have racial problems. If you look at the statistics, that just plain is not so, and I want to point these things out for everyone, including any children who may be getting the wrong idea from television or education areas. During the last year, the 10 countries that saw the greatest number of people sworn in as Americans were, in order, Mexico, Philippines, India, Dominican Republic, China, Cuba, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, and El Salvador. None of these countries are European countries. In other words, people from everywhere else around the world are trying to get in here. Obviously, we do not have a big racial problem in this country or all these people would not be trying to come here. Another interesting list is the most successful, in terms of income, people coming to the United States. Number one, people from India--I know a lot of very successful people from India. Frequently, they came here not even knowing how to speak English, but they succeed by hard work and strong families. People from the Philippines, Taiwan, Cuba, and Pakistan are all doing better than the native-born. I am very pleased that the Appropriations Committee removed this DEI funding. I intend to vote for these bills.

Mr. GROTHMAN

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

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I am going to address a topic I have addressed before this time earlier in the week, but it was brought up again yesterday in the Oversight Committee, entirely inappropriately. It is something that is brought up with each authorization bill or appropriation bill, and it is apparent that the other side of the aisle desperately wants a new bureaucracy dealing with what I will call preferences. It has been in the news lately because there was a Supreme Court decision saying that, for the first time in 50 years, in the United States, we could not discriminate or use--I guess they were primarily focusing on race but they could have used sex as well--in university admissions. It put an end to 50 years of discrimination at universities. It has also been in the paper because we have a Secretary of Labor appointed, not yet confirmed, that believes that this country was built on white supremacy, and we have a proposed new head of the Joint Chiefs who believes that we should cap the number of White male officers at 42 percent. Of course, this gets into other areas as well that the Court did not touch. It gets involved in the area of government hiring. It gets into the area of hiring by businesses that do business with the government. I think a lot of Americans are not aware that if you have at least 50 employees and do business with the government, you are required it submit a statement every year to the government called the EEO-1, listing the race and sex and the amount of money all your employees make. It also goes into play with government contracting. Frequently, government contracts are reserved for certain people. It will continue to be an issue as even after this decision, individual universities have gone down the path of not using tests for admissions. Historically, for example, to get into medical school you had to pass a test called the MCAT test. I had always felt when I was in my teens and twenties that we had the smartest kids go on to become doctors. But the medical schools are shifting away from tests, which are an objective measure of intelligence, and using things like essays to determine who the next doctor is. I want to make several comments about this preference idea and why it is so important, as we work through our authorizing bills and our appropriation bills, that we do not slide into this. First of all, for people who claim, like our Secretary of Labor, that we are a racist country, or a Eurocentric country, I want to point out that the most successful ethnic group in America today are people from India. The second most successful are people from the Philippines. Other groups like Chinese, Japanese, if you look at Latin America, Cubans are all more successful than the average American, at least judged by income earned. According to Thomas Sowell, the children of immigrants from the West Indies, the children of immigrants from, say, Jamaica or the Bahamas are more successful than the native-born. If all these people come here and are successful, why in the world would we want the government sticking their nose in and establishing a whole new bureaucracy? I also had an experience over the weekend with regard to the Hmong. The Hmong are perhaps the most--the largest number of so-called minorities in my district. I talk to a lot of the Hmong at their festivals. It is always enjoyable to be at their festivals. And, it gives me a chance to eat Hmong food, which allows me to become more used to very hot food. It is always enjoyable to see such happy people as the Hmong are in their festivals. They had a festival in Sheboygan last week. One of the things I like to ask the Hmong, since if there was ever a group that would have felt like a minority when they came here it would be the Hmong; obviously not European. When they came here they didn't know the language. I ask either the older generation how many children plus nieces or nephews they have and they all smile. When they get done adding it up, it seems like it is 30 or 40. I ask, have any of them had any trouble with the law? No. Do all of them graduate from high school? Yes. Do all of them have jobs? Do all those that have children, were the children all with the mother and father at home? The answer is yes. I find the same thing when I ask the younger generation, and I ask them about their siblings or their cousins. They have to add up in their mind how many there are. There could be 30, 35, 40. All of them have had no problem with the law. All of them, when they have children, there is a father in the house. All of them are living the American Dream. Again, it drives home the idea that in America we do not have a problem in which we have a European class that is preventing other people from succeeding. Indeed, the new people who come here do better than the people who have been here all along. That would be one indication that we do not need these new bureaucrats running around labeling people by their racial background. The next thing I will point out that inevitably all of these programs have is what I will refer to as, ``stupid rules.'' Let us determine, for example, who is Hispanic and in need of help. If my ancestors were in Spain, came to Cuba for a couple generations, and then moved to the United States, they would be considered Hispanic in need of help. If my ancestors lived in Spain and came to the United States, they would not need help. They would not be considered a group in need of preferences. If you are, for example, one-quarter Native American and one-quarter Hispanic and the rest, say, English or German, you would, again, be considered a minority. A minority that needs help, even though nobody in your life even knew what your ancestry was, but according to the diversity bureaucrats, you get to check off a box and are in need of special help. There are a variety of reasons they claim we need affirmative action, one of them is to make up for past injustices, but all of these ethnic programs or whatever we want to call them, apply to people who just moved to the United States. Does it make any sense to say someone who moved here directly from Morocco or Nigeria or Haiti gets preferences when they had nothing bad happen to them in America? As a matter of fact, it is even more ridiculous than that. They get preferences over the native born. For the purposes of filling out the form, if I move here from Peru and I am not even a citizen, but I have a green card, I get preferences over a person who has lived in America all along. That is, obviously, a potential for a lot of divisiveness. Along these lines, there are two rationales. One rationale is, we have to make up for past injustices, which makes no sense when you are giving preferences to people who just moved here. The other one is supposedly to show diversity. Now, let's look at our examples again. If I moved here or my ancestors moved here from Cuba, I don't know any Spanish, I have never been to a Spanish-speaking country, and I have grown up in a northern suburb in the United States. What diversity do I bring to any company? What diversity do I bring to any school? I bring no diversity at all. I don't know why that is not talked about by people who want to push these programs. As I mentioned, these programs also affect grants given or who gets government contracts. The government sticks their nose in, and if a husband owns a business, he is penalized. If a wife owns the business, that may be considered good in creating diversity. Is that fair? They both have similar backgrounds. It does encourage lying and crookedness in America as you run across people who put their business in the wife's name so they can get the government contract, but is that something we want to do? I don't think so. Nevertheless, that is an inevitable result of this diversity. The next question that has to be brought up is for a lot of jobs, probably for the vast majority of jobs, is ethnic diversity really something that matters? If we are hiring a new engineer, if we are hiring a new brain surgeon, does it matter whether you are from China or Cuba or Morocco or Poland? You want the best person, the one who has done best in school, the one who has demonstrated just an innate intelligence to do these jobs. Diversity or where your ancestors came from does not help as well. Now, let's look at another big reason why it is important that the Republican Party fight these diversity bureaucrats every step of the way. These diversity bureaucrats have to justify their job, and to justify their job, they will do things like have little classes in diversity in their businesses or colleges or governmental areas. These diversity bureaucrats, to justify their existence, will tell young people, or older people, that there is a huge amount of racism in America, and they need the diversity bureaucrats to even things out. This is one way to destroy America. You are going to cause people to walk around with a chip on their shoulder who should not be walking around with a chip on their shoulder. Worse, you are going to be dividing America. One of the things that has made America so great is, out of many, one--E Pluribus Unum. The diversity bureaucrats want to go the other way. They do not want people from all around the world considering themselves one united group. The diversity bureaucrats want to take what was one united group, tear it apart, and have people angry at each other or fighting with each other. This does not work anywhere else in the world. When I read about elections in other parts of the world, one thing that makes them so contentious, sometimes violent, is that the elections become a contest between two different groups. Look at what has happened in Sri Lanka over a period of years between the two big groups there. What has happened in Nigeria between the different tribes there. Of course, in the 1970s, it wound up there were tens of thousands of people dying as the ethnic groups or the tribes in Nigeria separated and wound up fighting. Why in the world would we want elections in America to be a contest between groups? That is sadly what these bureaucracies are going to want. I will close with a couple anecdotes, so people back home know what is going on in America. I know somebody who worked for a manufacturing firm and that manufacturing firm had four engineers. They all were men. They had to hire a fifth engineer and they were told by the diversity firm they contracted with that their fifth hire had to be a woman. It didn't matter if they had found a perfectly good candidate for the job. They were afraid that the government would come in and penalize them in some fashion or audit them if the next person was not a woman. It clearly is not right. The same company was going to hire a new person in management and their first four or five members of management were all of European descent. They were told they had to go out of the way to hire somebody who wasn't European in management rather than just taking the best person that they could. I don't think most Americans would agree with that sort of thing, but that is what has been going on in America for the last 50 years. I strongly encourage the Republican Party to draw a line in the sand. Joe Biden wants to insert these diversity bureaucrats in all government agencies, and they will stick their nose in hiring decisions, in promoting decisions. They will stick their nose in who gets grants around the country. This is a way to divide America. America has become the greatest country in the world by viewing people as individuals. We should keep viewing people as individuals. We do not need diversity bureaucrats throughout our government. I encourage all Members of this body to treat everybody equally and look at everybody as an individual, not as a representative of where their ancestors came from years and years ago. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk a little bit about a hearing we are going to have tomorrow in the Oversight and Accountability Committee regarding members of President Biden's family. It is a hearing I don't want to have. I think the President has done a pretty bad job, and politically he has made a lot of mistakes that have made him unpopular, but what we are dealing with here is significant sums of money, tens of millions of dollars, that appears to have flowed to his family from other countries around the world--in particular, China and Ukraine. It is very difficult as a Congressman to know exactly what American policy should be with regard to these countries, but it makes it even more difficult if it is apparent that the President of the United States or his family may have received significant amounts of money and may have even been subject to blackmail if the worst had happened. I strongly encourage the American public and the Chair to tune into our hearing tomorrow because we are going to unveil a new witness whose name has not been publicly revealed, and I think it is important for all Americans to pay attention and see exactly what is going on.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the President or the Members of this body to weigh in with the President and try to come to some sort of conclusion on the war with Ukraine. It seems to me that there are two groups: people who want us to pull out and people who want us to be all in for years and years. However, the longer this war drags on, the worse long-term relationships get between Russia and the United States. Russia has a very low birthrate and has had a lot of their young people leave for the United States and other parts of the world recently. Ukraine has the second lowest birthrate in the world. Neither of these countries can afford to lose any more of their young people to this war. The sooner the war wraps up, the better. I am very disappointed that the press is not asking questions of the Biden administration and that the Biden administration seems completely uninterested in negotiating some settlement of the war. I am aware of the fact that the U.S. cannot appear an impartial broker, but we should strongly encourage Turkiye, Israel, or France to step in and try to negotiate an end to this war. I do not know why it seems like the Biden administration does not want it to end.

Mr. GROTHMAN

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

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I won't keep you here for 60 minutes. There are a couple of issues I think that I have dominated discussion here the last couple of weeks, or should have dominated the discussion, that I think deserve a little bit of attention today. I am going to address, one more time, our crisis at the southern border. I am a little bit afraid that, as the weeks and months roll on, people are being accustomed to what is going on at the southern border. But as with every tragedy that happens in our society, if a tragedy happens every week or every month, we ought to talk about it every month. Now, recently, the Biden administration changed the way we allow people from certain countries, Cuba, Haiti, one of the Central American countries, to be able to come in here. But we have to look and see how many people are crossing the southern border and, if we look, including people coming across in the new administrative fashion, every month we continue to hit all-time records of people coming into the United States. The most recent month available is May. We are still waiting for the June numbers. There we have a total of 227,000 people crossing our southern border. If we compare that to last May, it was 142,000; and if we compare it to the first May under President Biden, it was 74,000. So things are going up dramatically, but it seems as though the press is not as appropriately concerned as they should be. In other words, we are succeeding in getting them bored; the greater the concern should be. I want to point out as well that as the total number of people come across, different subgroups continue to come up. We, right now, have unaccompanied minors at approximately 7,000 people. Now, recently, The New York Times reported we have lost tens of thousands of young people coming here. We have almost 7,000 people crossing the border every month, not being supervised by their parents or, quite frankly, any other adult. The Border Patrol will tell you that sometimes if you do a DNA test, children that are coming across with people who purport to be their parents, purport to be their aunts or uncles, are not. This should be a cause of great concern here in this Chamber. When children were left to spend a week or 2 weeks apart from their parents, that was considered a major concern and something we all had to bring up. But no, I believe that there is a new committee formed, and one of the things we will have to look at is what we can do to make sure that people who are entering the United States have not one but, in most cases, both of their parents with them. It is not a good idea for the United States to be part of a system which is causing people, young people, to be separate from, in many case, both parents, in other cases, one parent. Hopefully, we can change our policy down there, a little more family oriented, and the United States will not act as a kind of coconspirator with the drug cartels in breaking up these families. I think it is also important that we not only check this out when people are crossing into our border but check them out when our Department of Labor finds young people, as they do, working maybe third shift, maybe working illegally. We had a committee hearing on this. It wasn't publicized as much as it should have been, but we find the Department of Labor expresses no interest at all, as far as we can tell, when they find a child working third shift, when they find a child working in such fashion against the law. They do not look for the parents at all, and this is something that should change if the administration was all concerned about these parents. Nobody can tell me if a child was working illegally, working too late, working at too young an age, and they were an American citizen, and this were found out, the appropriate authorities would not be contacting the parents and wondering what was going on. But, under the Biden administration, we don't care. Of course you are setting up a situation of human trafficking. When you have children who are unaccompanied by parents, that is an obvious result. We always refer to human trafficking. We should--frequently, I think the phrase ``human trafficking'' is used to kind of nicen up what is really going on, and that is prostitution. In any event, I call on the press corps to report on the new migrants coming in in the May numbers and sometime in the next couple of weeks, we should get new numbers in June. Last year, in June, we had 140,000 people cross across the southern border, and I hope the press corps takes a little bit of notice as to whether one more time we hit a record for the month. Right now we have numbers for the first 9 months of this fiscal year. Every one of the 9 months has hit a high in the number of people coming here, at least in recent history. We will find out within a couple of weeks whether we are on the tenth month in a row of record number of people coming in. The next issue that I would like to address--it was touched upon this week in some of the diversity talk--is that with regard to the transgender issue. It is an issue I never thought we would discuss here in Washington. It is an issue I don't think that even crossed people's minds 15 or 16 years ago. There are a variety of topics that people bring up here. Do transgenders get to use a girls' bathroom? Do transgenders get to use a girls' locker room if they are in sports? Do transgenders get to play on women's sports? But I think the most important issue, and it is one that should be more obvious, is what is society doing to reduce this problem? What they found out in Europe is that over time, the number of transgenders go up. If we didn't have this obvious increase in number of people, we wouldn't have anywhere near the problem in the first place. Now, why is it going up? I think the more you read, one of the reasons it is going up is this subgroup of our population is kind of held up as heroes. I would suggest that some people interested in this topic read an article by a woman by the name of Heather Mac Donald in which she discusses the transgender situation and the fact that all of the coverage in the press and all of the favorable comments from American politicians, particularly our President of the United States, referring to people who question the proliferation of the transgender movement, he says they are motivated by hate and fear. I don't know anybody who is hating anybody. I do think there are people who feel sorry for these people. But obviously, the number is increasing the more politicians and the news media pays attention to this subgroup and makes them out to be some sort of heroes. It gives people attention and, of course, all young people like attention. It gives people a sense of belonging, a sense that they are part of a cause. And, of course, young people like to be part of a rebellion of some nature. But the people who are being hurt by this more than anybody are, of course, the people who would not have gone down this path but are going down this path and it is brought to people's attention more and more. This is a group that was nowhere near as common in this country in the past and, quite frankly, I do not believe this is common in other nonwesternized countries. That is because in these nonwesternized countries it is not discussed as something that we ought to do. Now, I recently met with a young lady who was convinced that the reason she was unhappy is because she really should have been a boy. She now credits it entirely to looking on the internet where they told her if she was unhappy--and many, many young people are unhappy. They told her the reason she was unhappy is perhaps she should be a boy. So they took this young lady and, at the age of 12 or 13, they gave her powerful puberty blockers. They gave her testosterone, and eventually they removed her breasts. She, of course, came to regret it. I don't know what sort of doctor would look at a 15-year-old, knowing very well that people's opinions and idea of the world change so dramatically between 15 and 20 and 25 and 30, and decided to do something as irrevocable as remove this young gal's breasts. But this is happening all the time in this country. This gal was from another State, but I know of two hospitals in Wisconsin who would make this dramatic change to somebody. They wouldn't--I don't know why. Money. I can't imagine why they wouldn't say, why don't you come back when you are 23 or 24 and we will talk to you then. That wouldn't be a good idea then--but to a 15-year-old? Again, the reason she did it is because she got a lot of affirmation on the internet, people encouraging her, people telling her she is a hero, people telling her that she should be so proud of herself if she was going down this route. I think it would be good if we would start in this Chamber, among politicians here--and, hopefully, even the President--and stop encouraging people that this is an option. By the way, if people have these surgeries, they have to continue to take medications costing a great deal every month. If it were really true that this gal should have been a boy, she wouldn't have to continue to take medications even after she had the surgeries; however, she would have to take these medications for the rest of her life. I hope, in the future, people in this Chamber are a little bit more measured in their words before they imply to people that they are some sort of special heroes by getting their sex changed. So, in any event, these are two topics that I will say the other side has not been brought up to the degree in which it should be by the mainstream media and not brought up enough by my colleagues. So I hope when we return from our break over the weekend that these issues are brought up a little bit more in the future. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from Indiana for introducing this amendment. I think it is a commonsense amendment. Right now, there are all sorts of rumors out there that when people are admitted to the service academies--who, after all, are going to wind up running our military, the one part of our government that cannot fail--preferences are being given and they are not always taking the best people that they can. I want to point out something that is a little bit offensive about this whole diversity thing. Diversity for people like the Democratic Party, sadly, is solely determined by your genetics or your DNA or where your ancestors were 200 years ago. I will give you an example to show the foolishness of it and that the real goal here, I think, is to divide Americans. If I am one-quarter Peruvian, I can identify as Hispanic. I can identify as Hispanic despite the fact I have never spoken a word of Spanish and never been south of the border in my life. The people who just want to divide America would say that I have a unique perspective growing up in a Milwaukee suburb, despite the fact that I am one- quarter from a different part of the world. This is preposterous on its face, and it will inevitably lead to division as we are educating our military that they should look at people by where their ancestors came from, not as individuals. This true racism, which is what it absolutely is because that is how they determine which silo you fit into, has to be ripped away from our society and the military, in particular. The idea that we have different viewpoints because of where our ancestors came from despite the fact that we have not been there and know nothing of them is preposterous. Like I said, in addition to the divisiveness, you are going to wind up with people who are not necessarily the best people to lead our military. Anybody familiar with military history knows the important decisions that have to be made during wartime. We want those decisions made by the brightest people we have, not by people who have been picked based upon where their DNA was 2,000 years ago.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I will address one of the very important Supreme Court decisions which came down in the last couple weeks and some of the comments that have been made critical of that decision. I am talking about the one that dealt with a policy now known in the United States as affirmative action. What that policy does is it gives, as a practical matter, preferences both on the basis of race and gender in university admissions. Actually, the public debate should go beyond that because in this country not only do we have a policy in which we try to have certain groups jump ahead of other people based on test scores or grade point average, we also have preferences, or encourage, as a practical matter, preferences in hiring for government jobs as well as hiring in jobs working for a private organization, if that private organization has at least 50 employees and does business with the Federal Government. There are also preferences with regard to government contracting. As a practical matter, we have had these preferences since 1965. We are talking about things that are 67 years old. I will point out that sometimes with regard to government contracting, it encourages lying. I have talked to people in my district who talk about their colleagues putting businesses in the name of their wives so they can get the preference for a woman-owned business even though the guy continues to run the business. My friend doesn't like it because he is an honest person and he refuses to lie. He doesn't like the fact that people who are lying move ahead of him. He is in the construction field. There are two ideas put forth as to why we need these preferences: One is to undo past injustices from years ago, going all the way back to slavery in the 1860s; and, secondly, the idea that somehow we should ask businesses or government to have a more diverse task force. I am going to deal with each of one of these separately. First of all, with regard to past injustices, the benefits in universities and the benefit in government affirmative action goes to people who were never even in this country. We have to ask ourselves, why, if my ancestors came here from Peru in the 1990s and never experienced a period in this country, assuming there was such a period in which there was a lot of prejudice, why would we be giving preferences to people who moved here in the 1990s? Also, Madam Speaker, Black people who moved here from Jamaica or the Bahamas in the 1990s, well past the era of Jim Crow, much less well past slavery times, why would we be giving them preferences? The Biden administration, most recently, is trying to add another group to get preferences, people from the Middle East or northern Africa. Why, if someone moves here from Algeria or Syria today, they may not even be citizens, why would they be given preferences? What is the underlying rationale? The other thing to point out here is that we are hypothetically giving preferences to people who are doing better than the native-born population. This is something people should remember before they advocate for this or if they have children or grandchildren making the pitch for this. Right now the ethnic group in America that is doing the best financially--and money is not the most important thing in life, but nevertheless, that is frequently what we look to when we determine these programs--are Indian Americans who are the most successful group in America today. Behind that, we have people from China. I think the number two group right now is from the Philippines. People from Cuba are doing better than the native born. According to Thomas Sowell--this is a book somewhat dated--according to Thomas Sowell, the second generation after people move here from the West Indies, Jamaica, and the Bahamas do better than the average American. Given that, like I said, we are dealing with people who came here well past the time of prejudice. Why in the world would we be giving preferences to these people? The next thing I will point out is that some people fall back on the idea that we need a diverse group of students or a diverse workforce. This is kind of a bizarre argument, and it is something people should have to defend. Let's say I am one-quarter Peruvian--I am not, but let's say for the sake of argument I am one-quarter Peruvian. I have never been to Peru. I don't know a word of Spanish. I have never been to a Spanish-speaking country. Why in the world would we be giving me preferences to bring the Peruvian viewpoint to an engineering firm, let's say? It makes no sense at all. I have no connection other than DNA with people that are Peruvian. These are some of the ideas that I think people should have to respond to before they are critical of that decision, or people who want this sort of policy to continue.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am here today to highlight the important work the House is doing in the 118th Congress to hold the Biden administration accountable. My colleagues are familiar with all we are doing with regard to looking at student loan agreements, the abusive pandemic-era policies, but today, I want to focus on something the administration is doing at the southern border that it has no business doing. Their new unlawful use of the CBP1 app is allowing an even greater number of people to come across our border. In addition to people, the got-aways, in addition to the family units, in addition to the unaccompanied minors, we have people using an app to sign up and wind up coming into our country. In the current fiscal year, in each one of the 9 months, we had for that month an all-time record number of people coming here. I think in part because of the use of this app, the slumbering press corps is not paying attention to that. Let me repeat that one more time. In each of the last 9 months, we had an all-time high in the number of people coming into the United States. This is an absolute scandal. I am glad our committee is taking it on, and I hope the press corps pays a little bit more attention to this invasion.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, first of all, I point out that every month in this country, if you include the people who come over here kind of administratively, we hit new records of people who I think are here illegally. That is not going down if you compare month after month. In any event, currently the Biden administration is encouraging our embassies abroad to fly the so-called pride flag on our embassies, including the Vatican. This is completely inappropriate, and the Biden administration should immediately stop this policy. America is a blessed Nation that has, I think, been the light of the world. Rather than sending a message to the world that America stands for and is great because of its freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution and the bravery, faith, purity, and respect for the law of its people, it sends the message that America stands for the LGBT sexual agenda. Leaving aside the absurdity that any sexually related flag should stand with Old Glory--how ridiculous--this is not the message we want to send to the countries around the world. It is also an insult to the hundreds of millions of Americans who oppose this agenda as well as the hundreds of thousands who made our country great and would be appalled by this. President Biden, please take down this flag.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I missed roll call 278--I used an old card. Had I been present, I would have voted ``NO'' on rollcall No. 278. Amendment No. 2 Offered by Mr. Molinaro

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, before talking about the main event of three issues, it occurs to me it has been a while since we really have addressed what should be the end to the Ukraine-Russian war. In the past I have expressed frustration, and I still have this frustration as to why the Biden administration is not trying to work towards an end to the war? Eventually every war ends. The longer the war drags on, the worst it is for all involved. Ukraine has the second lowest birth rate in the world. It is a tragedy for any country to lose its young people, but particularly for a country that has so few young people in the first place. Likewise, Russia has a low birth rate, and they also have a high emigration rate, in which people are coming to this country. I ran into one in my district. Mr. Speaker, I know from spending time in the San Diego sector along the Mexican border, a lot of Russians have come across there. So you have two countries with a shortage of young people, and they are dying in a war. For humanitarian reasons we ought to end that war. Furthermore, the war is very costly. Buildings are being damaged in Ukraine to a huge extent, and geopolitically, the Biden policy of letting this war drag on without sticking their nose in there at all for well over a year now drives China and Russia together. It wasn't that long ago that we had over 1,000 McDonald's in Russia. I recently toured a factory in my district. They owned a similar factory in Russia which they had to sell off. What I took from that, there was a time in the relatively recent past when the United States and Russia had very good relations, the United States and Ukraine had very good relations, and I don't know why we couldn't get back there if this war ended quickly. It seems when you talk to the Biden people they don't care if it goes on for years. Again, I make a plea to the Biden administration: See if you can look into doing what you can do to end that war. Now we will look at three issues that I think all have the potential to destroy the country, and I think we need some clear thinking on all three. First of all, let's look at the border. There has been a change in the way some people are entering the country. They are able to sign on to get entry to the United States, an app apparently, if they are coming in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It is because more people are coming in that way that it makes it more difficult to see how many people are coming in each month, and because it is now in two different places, we begin to lose track of the number of people coming into this country compared to where we were historically. Let's look at, for example, where we were in May. In the most recent May, 227,000 people came across the border as what we refer to as illegally; a year ago it was 166,000; 2 years ago it was 74,000; and 3 years ago, under President Trump, it was 6,000. We have gone from 6,000 a month crossing in May three years ago to 227,000 crossing in this past May. It is kind of a dramatic increase and something that should remain on the front page of our newspapers every day until this crisis abates. Mr. Speaker, it is the same thing if you look at April. Now that we have the other numbers, in April most recently 211,000 people crossing the border; a year ago 187,000; 2 years ago 66,000; and 3 years ago under 6,000. Again, we have gone from under 6,000 to 211,000. A dramatic increase in the number of people crossing the border. This is not a problem we can't deal with because we have to be bipartisan. It is always nice to be bipartisan, but this problem was solved 3 years ago, and now we have gone up by a factor of over 30. As we have an increasing number of people crossing the border, we also have more unaccompanied minors crossing the border. People ought to be especially concerned when people who are 13 or 14 years old are crossing the border without parents or even say an aunt or an uncle. Now we are having about 6,000 to 8,000 unaccompanied minors crossing every month. Under the prior administration it was 500 to 1,000. There are a lot more young people. There was a time when people on the other side of the aisle would be concerned about people crossing the border separately from their families. That was people who were separated for maybe 2 weeks because their parents had broken the law. Now we have 6,000 to 8,000 people every month being separated from their parents. Who knows if they will ever see them again? For minors, the lack of concern is stunning. Recently there was an article in The New York Times that I think the administration to a degree has disavowed, but no matter whose numbers you look at, Mr. Speaker, the administration has lost track of tens of thousands of minors. They don't know where they are after they gave them to people to take care of them. We have lost track of tens of thousands of kids. Particularly, we have a crisis in this country of human trafficking and sex trafficking that should be of particular concern to the administration. It should be of particular concern because people rarely come over here without the Mexican drug cartels signing off. We can only imagine that when these young kids work, sometimes third shifts in factories illegally, that they were sending money not only back home but to the drug cartels as well. I talked to the Acting Labor Secretary about what she should do if minors who are coming are found crossing illegally or if minors are found working illegally. She refused to say how often they contact the parents. Which, again, I thought was horrible. If you were an inspector of a factory, Mr. Speaker, and found 15-year-old immigrants working there who shouldn't, wouldn't the first thing you would do would be to contact the parents? Obviously. The Biden administration doesn't do that. The Secretary of Labor will not be drawn into even commenting that we ever contact the parents of young people who are found here. We should always try to unite children with their parents. Quite frankly, I even feel at the border if children come across with one parent that we should hold them up and look for the other parent. In the United States if parents are dealing with a divorce situation, in an effort to keep that family together, they sometimes try and say that one parent cannot move to another part of the country because we want both parents to participate in raising the children. I don't know why we don't do the same thing at our southern border. On the flip side of letting everyone in, we are also taking our eye off of criminals who are not kicked out. Without a lot of hoopla in the newspapers, the Biden administration in their budget guesses that for the next 2 years we can anticipate about 29,000 people being deported. I think they might have computed it in a different way, but in his final 2 years under Barack Obama, we deported about 460,000 people. In one 2-year period under Obama, 460,000 were deported. Under President Biden, we have only 29,000 who were deported in a 2-year period. It is just like saying that we absolutely don't care what is going on here. Of course, many deportations are caused by people here who are breaking the law. People who are for open borders at least say: They are all such wonderful people. They are all so hardworking. What an asset to America. The Biden administration is doing a pretty pathetic job even compared to his predecessors, including President Obama. He is doing a bad job of deporting people who break the law. Of course, along with being soft on the border and letting everybody across, it inevitably means more people are bringing drugs across the border. In this country right now we have about 108,000 people every year dying of illegal drug overdoses. That is a crisis that America is not paying careful enough attention to. As I have pointed before, we have about 57,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam war over 12 years. I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war. There were articles all the time about American troops dying. People were protesting about how many Americans were dying, and 57,000 people died in 12 years. It was a true tragedy. We now have 108,000 Americans dying every year from illegal drug overdoses in this country largely because illegal drugs are flying across the southern border. Virtually nothing is being done in this budget to tighten up the border. Nothing is being done to prevent more people from coming here. The inevitable result is a further change in America as the people who come here may not have the traditional American values that we need to keep our Republic going. Not to mention, we will have people coming here who are taking advantage of our generous welfare system and people coming who are breaking the law and are not going to be deported. That is the first issue that I feel that we really have to address. The second horrible policy concerns the bizarre demands of this new transgender lobby. This past week I had quite an experience. I met with an 18-year-old who had doctors prescribe from 12 years old on testosterone and puberty blockers. At age 15, the wonderful medical establishment in our United States of America--I think primarily from the psychiatry wing of the medical establishment--decided to remove her breasts at age 15. I don't care if someone went to medical school. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows people change dramatically between when they are 15, 20, 30, and 40 years of age. The idea that we have people going to medical school--I guess that is why they talk about people with book smarts and common sense. Nobody with common sense, unless they are absolutely obsessed with greed and just will do anything to make money in a surgery would possibly remove the breasts of a 15-year-old girl. They are doing it at two hospitals in Wisconsin which is horrible. This gal happened to have it done in California. Now this poor woman wants to undo the damage, and she can't. In Europe they are finding that puberty blockers may affect bones and brain health. Sweden found that 10 years after reassignment surgery the suicide rate was 20 times that of their peers. Is that even really a surprise? I could almost guess it on my own without reading the study. That is what they are finding in Europe, which went down this path before this. In European countries, even their liberal, let's worship the doctor societies know that they made a mistake. I think someone has to look at the psychiatric industry and give them some more supervision because they are doing horrible things that anybody with any common sense would know. The other thing the Europeans found is something we should realize in this country, too. This is a much bigger problem than when I was a child, and nobody ever seemed to know about it. How is that possible? Well, it is possible because the more they talk about it in the press, the more they talk about it in the entertainment medium, the more self- righteous politicians talk about it, the more young people begin to play in their mind with the idea that maybe if they are a boy, they should be a girl, and maybe if they are a girl, they should be a boy. This is what happened to the poor gal I met with. She was 10 or 11 years old, 12 years old. She was unhappy. Given all that is out there on the internet, she thought, well, maybe I am unhappy because I should be a boy, which is perfectly understandable if you are inundated with this option on television and the computer constantly. This is what we have. We have a gender dysphoria crisis, and the crisis has been caused by all these doctors claiming it is a common thing. The more kids hear about other people going through it--they may read articles about it, as this gal did, or read about it on the internet. It sounds interesting. ``There are these experts saying I am unhappy because maybe I want to be a boy.'' That is what happens. I hope the press is a little bit more responsible in the future about pushing this as an everyday thing. When the press begins to push it, when it gets out there on computer screens, people begin to read it and begin to say maybe it is them. There are at least two Congressmen out there with great bills on this, one from Georgia and one from California. I hope we see these bills on the floor of the Congress here in the very near future. My one criticism of the bills is they only ban this type of risky surgery under age 18. I don't know why we don't try to knock that up a little bit higher. I know in this country, as a practical matter, we bar the sale of beer until age 21. I think this surgery seems a little bit crazy even for a 30-year-old. I hope we see these bills on the floor soon. I hope before they get to the floor, the authors make an adjustment to the bills and knock up the age to at least age 21. One other comment I learned reading about this situation and talking to someone who went through it is that part of the problem is we have these well-meaning, progressive people who egg on these people. They get on their Facebook page or whatever. They tell people who they don't even know how proud they are of them for doing these surgeries, how happy they should be now that they did these surgeries. By popular culture acting as cheerleaders for these surgeries, what do you think you get? A bunch of young, unhappy people who want to be happier. Every time someone sends you an email, sends you whatever comments, ``You are so brave, and I am so happy for you,'' you are encouraging these people to get these horrific surgeries. A lot of the blame, I think, goes on the people who are not familiar with this, not familiar with the study showing a dramatic increase in suicides, not to mention people without any common sense. They egg these poor boys and girls on to get these surgeries. I beg people who consider encouraging these people or flattering these people for what they are doing to please stop it. Familiarize yourself with the information and stop to think that by flattering and encouraging these people, you may be the one responsible for making these life-changing decisions. I will wind up by saying I think we need more people looking at the qualifications of some of these psychiatrists who push this and why this whole profession has allowed this to careen out of control. I think we have to look at the role that profession is playing in our society. I will blame President Biden a little for this. His administration is all-in on this transgender, sexual confusion agenda, which is leading so many people to be unhappy. The fourth area that I would like to address tonight, I don't like to address it. I really don't like to address it because it is such an awkward area, but it has to be addressed because the President of the United States is obsessed with it, so I have to address it. The final issue is the issue of racism. It is Joe Biden's favorite issue, as far as I can tell. Joe Biden talked about racism four times in his inaugural speech and white supremacy once. He keeps bringing it up in his State of the Union speeches. Again this year, he inferred that policemen are racist, and we have to warn particularly little Black children about racist police. The studies don't show it. The studies show, adjusted for crimes committed, if anything, it is the other way around. Joe Biden, a White guy--I wonder what other people think of him-- keeps getting up there and saying how racist we all are, that we have a racism problem with police. Like I said, the studies show that that is not true. What you can do, and I think people like Joe Biden have done, is intimidate the police into being afraid to act because they are in fear of being charged with racism. That is what you can do. You can make the police timid. Of course, ever since we had this massive antipolice feeling in the aftermath of the events in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, we have had a dramatic increase in the number of murders. I think a lot of these murders have to be blamed on the timidity of the police, which is caused by this strong antipolice feeling that you are getting out of Joe Biden and his allies and the mainstream media, which I think also creates this antipolice feeling and causes the police to feel that they have to back off for fear they will be called racists or whatever. Joe Biden again talked about white supremacy at Howard University, at their graduation. It was kind of a weird speech because I think normally in graduation speeches, you are dealing with the best and brightest in America. I know Howard has a very good reputation. You should have people leaving that stage with smiles on their faces, anxious to change the world and do wonderful things in the United States. Instead, we get President Biden showing up and saying what a racist society we have and creating, I think, a defeatist attitude for the people graduating there. I hope they got over Joe Biden's speech. Joe Biden's Secretary of Labor--designated; she hasn't been confirmed yet--believes the country was built on white supremacy. She will not back off that statement, despite me asking her a couple of times to do so. The Secretary of Labor, who has something to do with all sorts of laws in this country, apparently believes our country was built on white supremacy. The proposed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff feels we should be capping the number of White officers in the military at 42 percent. I mean, I would think he would be primarily concerned about getting the best people in there. It is important we have the best military in the world. Instead, we are going to have a bean counter who it sounds like is more concerned about where people's great-great-great-grandparents were born than what their qualifications are today. A study found, I mentioned before, in Joe Biden's first 2 years, of 97 judges he appointed, only 5 were White men. Two of those were gay. This was in the aftermath of two Democratic Senators telling President Biden they were not going to confirm any more of his appointees if they were White men unless they were gay. To what degree are our judges being picked as the best, or to what degree are they being picked with Joe Biden feeling there is something wrong with appointing a White guy for the job? Those are kind of amazing numbers, aren't they? I am not a big fan of President Biden, and I would have guessed, if you would have asked me how many White men were in his first 97 judges, I would say, well, he is probably doing all he can to find people who aren't White guys, so it is only 25 or 30. Well, it is only five. In his budget, he is asking that all of his agencies--Department of Defense, Department of the Interior, wherever--have new equity action teams. These pernicious new employees, I think, are going to run around and judge people solely by race or gender. Their goal is supposedly to look at diversity, which we will talk about in a second. Again, their goal is to follow down this path of all Americans are supposed to view themselves as a subgroup. He tried to discharge debt of only farmers of color until the courts shot him down there. He is trying to add a new preferred class. All these topics are recent topics. We ought to discuss this issue before it goes any further. Right now, there are a variety of classes when you fill out your Census form, when you fill out your EEO-1, which is a form that you have to fill out if you do business with the government. They break out if you are Asian, Pacific Islander, African American, Latin American, Native American. They want a new class--and I think with a class comes preferences-- for Middle Eastern and North African people. Again, I think we should have a public discussion here. I don't think Middle Eastern and North African people have been discriminated against or mistreated in America. I assume most of the people, if there are benefits from this program, will come to people who just came here or are coming in the future. I haven't seen a lot of articles on that, but there should be a public discussion. If somebody comes here from Syria, if somebody comes here from Algeria, should they get preferences in hiring? Should they get preferences if they found a business and are looking for a government contract? Should they get preferences if they want to get into medical school? That is what President Biden apparently wants, but I think we should have a public discussion on whether he gets away with it. As an aside, I am not sure how Joe Biden feels the country is such a white supremacist country. I don't believe you can really judge people that are worth their happiness by the amount of income, but it is a number that is easy to judge. If you look online, most of the successful groups in America today are not of European heritage. The most successful are from India. Most Indians that I know came here and are wildly successful, although they came here without even knowing English--people from Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Cuba. Thomas Sowell wrote a book 40 years ago--so it is a bit out of date, but I can't find any more recent information--in which he claims that people coming from the Caribbean, the children of people who come here from the Caribbean, make more money than the average American. I guess he would be talking about people from Jamaica. I suppose you would think of people, therefore, like Kamala Harris' dad, who came here from Jamaica and wound up being a professor at Stanford. He did very well. I don't think he had a huge amount of experience with racism, becoming a professor at Stanford. I would think most professors would love to have a job like that. Before we go that much further, I do think we should look at individual questions that should be answered. The first question is, right now, for the purpose of these government forms and who you hire, you kind of self-identify. We will pick Peru because I talked to someone from Peru the other day. If you came here directly from Peru, you are Peruvian and Latin American. If you have one of four grandchildren, they are also called Peruvian and are considered to bring a diverse attitude toward a job, or America supposedly should make up for past discrimination even though their ancestors may never even have been in America. Is it 25 percent? Is it 12\1/2\ percent? The Senator from Massachusetts had one of these DNA tests, and she found out she was like 1/64th Native American or less than 1/64th, but she apparently felt that was enough to put on her forms and apparently add diversity to the Harvard Law School faculty. I don't know if she really thought that, but I guess she allowed herself to be labeled as Native American based on whatever that would be, one great-great-great-grandparent. Is that the way we should go? Or should it be one out of eight? Like, if one of your eight great-grandparents is a certain type, is that enough to identify with that type? Now we have DNA tests, so we can look at these things. I know in my district, there was a rumor. People questioned whether one person who owned a construction company was really a person of color like he claimed he was. He could have been because he could say he was one-eighth, and under the current law, that would be enough to get preferences. I think we ought to have that discussion. The next question is, since affirmative action really began in the 1960s, the idea was to make up, I think, for America's past sins, so should you have to have ancestors in America who can at least claim to have been hurt, or can you get what amounts to special preferences if you just immigrated to this country, say, a year ago? Right now, you don't even have to be a citizen. You can count on the government forms in which I think they view you more favorably if you have people from certain backgrounds, even if you were not in America for more than a couple of years. Should we require beneficiaries of these programs to be in America? Were your ancestors slaves in America, or can you be like Kamala Harris' dad and just have moved here from Jamaica, whether you had preferences or not? I don't know. The next issue that we should talk about is how long this should happen. We began to have affirmative action in the early 1960s. I think it really kicked into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. There was a lesser program under John Kennedy. We have had this program going for about 50 years. Obviously, they have added new groups that weren't included in the original number of groups. We have women in the mix now, too. How long should this program last with its government bureaucracy, with, in essence, government looking over people's shoulders, telling them who they have to hire for their company, that sort of thing? Another 10 years, another 100 years? Thomas Sowell has written about affirmative action, so that is another issue that we will have to look at. We will return and talk about other issues after this evening. Not the least of which I think we should talk about is how certain people think since you are supposed to be bringing diversity to the table. 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, I urge this body to take up H. Res. 461 and pass it as quickly as possible. Every year in this country the Federal Government, perhaps inappropriately, spends billions of dollars on elementary and secondary education. These buildings are designed and intended to be funded to teach the young children of this country, and not-so-young people, to read, to do math, to prepare themselves for a job. It has been brought to our attention that local officials all around the country, in an effort to ease the mass invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern border, are now using these schools as a shelter for people, who in many cases--in almost all cases--should not have come to the United States in the first place. I think it is very important that Congress weigh in immediately, since we are providing billions of dollars to these educational institutions, and say no. These educational institutions are to be used for education only, and we are not going to spend any more of that money to support people who shouldn't be here in the first place.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of discussion going on this week about regulation. As we go home for this 3-day weekend, I encourage my colleagues, as they get around their district, whether they run into people who are in farming, in manufacturing, in banking-- particularly in the nursing home field--to ask those folks about the difference between regulatory rules that they live under today and 30 years ago. How many more man-hours are they spending every week filling out government forms that does nothing to make their bank or farm or manufacturing facility run better. I think you will find them saying that they never would have gone into business in the first place if they knew about this blizzard of regulation, that they could not have swallowed it all at once but had to take a drip, drip, drip over 20 years. In any event, I encourage my colleagues to get out to a different group that they normally don't deal with, the businessmen and -women-- the farmer, manufacturer, nursing home, banker--and they will find out that our country is unquestionably poor because of the sea of people we have filling out paperwork every week.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Congresswoman Debbie Lesko for her fight and for our fight regarding gas stoves. What the Biden administration is trying to do with gas stoves is something that has become, sadly, more and more common from President Biden's party. It doesn't matter to the Hollywood elite, it doesn't matter to the limousine liberals, it doesn't matter to the Silicon Valley billionaires, and it doesn't, quite frankly, matter to the welfare classes. However, it matters to the middle class as to what their electric or monthly energy bill is. This is part of the Biden administration's effort to shut down gas stoves, which are much cheaper to operate than electric stoves, and it is a growing trend towards ignoring the middle class in America. These other groups I don't think would know what their electric bill is, but we have to bring back the gas stoves on the grounds that it will save money for the middle class who does know exactly what their electric bill is.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chairman, about 1 out of 3 Wisconsinites have a gas stove, and about 40 percent nationwide do. There is some name-calling over there as far as what the parties stand for. The gas stove is about three times cheaper than the electric stove. The Republican Party is the party of the working class. The party that pays attention to what their energy bill is. There is another class of people out there: The rich Hollywood types, the high-tech billionaires, the well-paid college professors who don't have to worry how much they pay for electricity. As a result, that side feels very good when a bill is passed where they restrict what the hoi polloi can do. Also, they don't have to worry about the welfare class because they will give stuff perhaps to the welfare class to make up the difference. But they won't help the middle class. And that is who the Republican Party tries to look out for. The average guy who knows exactly what he is paying in his energy bill. Mr. Chair, I ask that we leave the working class alone.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, we go home every weekend. In June, when we go home to Wisconsin, what do we think of? What is going on in June? June is Dairy Month in Wisconsin. It is Dairy Month around the whole country. Of course, last weekend, I spent Dairy Month at Breakfast on the Farm in Winnebago County and Breakfast on the Farm in Manitowoc County, having milk and all sorts of different cheeses. Whether you like Colby or provolone, cheddar or mozzarella, whether you like your milk pasteurized or raw, whole or 2 percent, whether you like cream cheese or just plain cream, Wisconsin is America's Dairyland, and everybody has to remember, June is Dairy Month. Now, on to our next topic. I have just been reading about a KGB defector. What he wrote should be required reading for all Congressmen and all young children. His name, he has since died, is Yuri Bezmenov. He was a Soviet defector in the 1980s. When he defected--he defected to China--he gave an interview about the KGB. He said things that I think are far different than what the average American thinks about the KGB. He pointed out that about 85 percent of the KGB employees were not spies. They were not going around looking for nuclear secrets or finding out more about our military. They were wide out in the open. They were engaging in psychological warfare, subversion to destroy the American psyche. He pointed out that what they do is out in the open, if only the press would pay attention. Well, you can see he was a newcomer to America, as he thought the press might pay attention. He pointed out that, at the time, people might think we were at peace, but in fact, we were at war. It was a war, psychological warfare. Nikita Khrushchev said the same thing. He felt we would destroy America from within. It would not be a military attack that would destroy America. It would be America losing confidence in itself. There are a variety of ways in which the United States is, in my mind, in danger. Last week, we talked about the huge deficit, and President Biden, through a variety of bills last year, certainly put the value of the dollar at risk. You can say we are in danger because we are losing the value of the family. Of course, John Adams said that our Constitution is built for a moral and religious people, totally unfit for any other kind. We have a situation here in which a group called Black Lives Matter, which had a lot to do with the Democrats maintaining their majority in 2020, Black Lives Matter was opposed to the traditional nuclear family. Of course, they have a lot of allies here in Congress who presumably didn't object to that. That is another way we could tear down America, through our growing welfare state, having more and more people without the psychological background of a family. We certainly have a problem at the southern border. No normal country could survive unlimited immigration. We see two things going on down there. We see over 200,000 people a month streaming across the border, and we also see, compared to past administrations, even people who break the law are not deported. You could say that is another way we are being destroyed from within. It is not a military attack, but it is over 200,000 people who have not been trained how to become Americans, who have not had drilled into them the freedoms that we should respect and that we are a great country because our great Constitution is supposed to have a limited government, guarantee us a limited government, and we are supposed to be self-reliant. That is certainly a problem. We have the bizarre transgender movement. I ran into a gal the other day who had literal surgery taking away some of her organs at 15 years old and puberty blockers. That is another way to completely try to blend the difference of the sexes, which would be another way to destroy society. What I am going to focus on tonight is the Biden obsession with racism. I think if there is one issue that Joe Biden seems most obsessed over, it is this idea that supposedly in the United States we are a racist country. He brought it up four times in his inaugural speech and talked about white privilege once. This year, in his State of the Union speech, again Joe Biden talked about the racist police and if you are a person of color, you have to tell your children to watch out for the racist police. Obviously, this is an important message from Joe Biden. He has certainly acted on it, as well. Right now, his Department of Labor nominee--she may make it; she may not--claimed in the past that we are a society built on white privilege, kind of this bizarre hatred of White people that I thought was merely in academia, but Joe Biden decided to try to appoint someone head of the Department of Labor who felt that way. I sure hope the Senate rejects her. He is trying to appoint General Charles Q. Brown to be head of the Joint Chiefs. He right off the bat said we have too many White officers. He wants to restrict the number of White officers in the military to 43 percent. In other words, he doesn't want qualified White people becoming officers, because he has got some psychological problem there. I think we have to pay attention to that sort of thing when it comes to the Biden administration. This is not limited to President Biden. Not long after he took office, both Senator Duckworth of Illinois and Senator Hirono of Hawaii threatened Joe Biden saying they did not want any more White men, that they were not going to vote to confirm any more White men in his administration. He met with them. They backed off that to a degree. I should say, he shouldn't appoint White men unless they are gay, which gets back to this kind of obsession with breaking away with the traditional family that we sadly have among the Democratic Party right now. In addition to that, President Biden wants in his budget to have new equity action teams in all of our government agencies: the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice. These equity action teams presumably will enforce the type of things that Senators Duckworth and Hirono want. They want to look at people's race before anybody gets hired. They want to look at somebody's race before they get a government grant. I think it is something that the American public is not discussing anywhere nearly as much as they should. It is kind of particularly ridiculous, because, of course, you are never probably going to have a country in which more immigrants, who have different ethnicity than the native born, have succeeded so much and are so accepted. If you look around, the most successful ethnic group in America today are Indian Americans. You look at other wildly successful groups: Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cuban. Thomas Sowell wrote 40 years ago--I can't vouch whether it is today or not-- but by the second generation, immigrants from the Caribbean of African descent outperform the average American. At a time when the overwhelming evidence is that racism has very little role in America, Joe Biden is trying to elevate the potentially hard feelings by doing all he can by not treating people equally and looking at people racially. Now, I think we should have a discussion over this, and the discussion does not necessarily have to be in Congress, but it should be here, as well. I think the discussion should be in periodicals, online, as people debate what the answers to various questions are. First of all, how long should this go on? Affirmative action--in other words, preferences based on race or based on sex, as well as preferences for women--have been going on since 1965. We have been going on with this thing 58 years. I have a feeling when Lyndon Johnson really kicked it off in earnest--there was a more mild policy under President Kennedy--when it was kicked off by President Johnson, I don't think even he would have dreamed that this would have been going on for 57 years. The question is, should there be a time when it ends. When we give people preferences or identify people by their ethnic group, what defines somebody's ethnic group? Right now, we identify or put on the government forms African American, Latin American, Asian Pacific Islander, Native American. What makes up a person in these groups? Right now you self-identify. In the extreme case of Elizabeth Warren, who was something like a 64th or a 128th Native American, she felt that was enough that she should be a Native American. I think she is relatively rare. I don't think a lot of Americans would do that, but apparently it is legal. It was a way for her to become a professor at Harvard Law School. But what should be the cutoff? A half a percent? A quarter a percent? One-eighth? On the face of it, it seems a little bit strange, because a lot of these people you would never even guess what ethnicity they are, but that is the way the system works nowadays. We do have DNA tests nowadays. I think we should put some sort of standards as to who gets preferences. Then where you come from. Right now, if you are somebody whose ancestry was in Spain and you come to the United States, you are considered a European, but if your ancestry is Spain and your ancestors spent three generations in Cuba, you are considered an ethnic minority. To me, that seems a little bit silly. I am not sure what the difference is. Maybe the person from Spain just came here right now and the person from Cuba, one-quarter Cuban, came here 50 years ago. Does this make any sense that when you fill out the forms or see who is going to get the government contract or who is going to get into Harvard Law School, that the person from Cuba is treated different than the person from Spain? If we have someone from Italy or somebody who was of Italian descent but spent three generations in Argentina, should that person be given preference? I think that is something we should have a public discussion over. Should you have to be from America? Right now, the way these programs work, if you show up, if you are not even a citizen, you can get preferences on the form. You have an example right now, the Vice President's own dad who came here from Jamaica. Originally, at the time this affirmative action kicked in, I thought it was a little bit to make up for slavery or make up for Jim Crow. Well, somebody like the Vice President's dad, he wasn't mistreated in America. He wasn't in America at all. He came here for the land of opportunity, came here to become a professor at Stanford University. Is that fair? When we try to identify different groups as somebody who really never suffered in the United States at all, because they are a recent immigrant, should they be getting these preferences? I think that is something that should be talked about. I don't know. Should there be a wealth component? We are supposedly helping the underserved communities, but the way the programs work today and the different areas that they pick out--I think it is government employment, employment in businesses that do business with the government, government contractors, if you have a business, and admissions to universities. Should there be a wealth component? If I am the son of a multi- multimillionaire who is a member of a favored group, do I get preferences? It kind of seems wrong to say I am an underserved group, but that is the way it works today, which is typical, and we will come back in a second to what Thomas Sowell says about affirmative action. He wrote a book on the topic. Usually it benefits the well-off people, as things that come up from the progressive background usually do. Should there be some familiarity with your background? I mean, if I am going to claim to get preferences because my ancestors came from Peru, should I have to know something about Peru? Somebody that doesn't even know Spanish, has spent generations here, never lived in a Spanish country, should I get preferences there? Should that have something to do with this? Are there jobs that should be exempt from preferences where it is entirely based on merit? One of the things that is going on in America today is a lot of medical schools are saying you don't have to take the MCAT test. Now, when I was younger, we usually associated doctors with the ones that did the best on the test because if you were going to be a doctor, it was a matter of life and death. We wanted to take the smartest person no matter what. Now we have medical schools saying we don't want to look at any test to determine your intelligence. We want to base your admission on things like what you say on an essay or how many groups you volunteered for, that sort of thing. I think we should have that discussion. Maybe we should have preferences for certain jobs like college professor where you can say it is not a matter of life and death if we have somebody who is not as good, but we should make sure we always get the better people for the medical field or for dentistry or for airline pilots or air traffic controllers. Should we say, well, we can afford to have people that aren't good air traffic controllers because what is the worst thing that could happen? I think that is another question that we should be asking right now because the Biden administration is clearly walking down this path. That is why they have these what we are referring to as equity action teams. We want to know exactly what standards the equity action teams are using. I had a fellow come up to me a few years ago whose son worked in one of our Federal agencies, and he loved the job. He went to college for the job. He was told after 9 or 10 years why he was not being promoted. He was told, you are a White guy who is not a veteran. We give preferences to veterans too. Is that fair? If they are going to continue down that path, shouldn't we at least make it public so this guy wouldn't have gone to school to learn about a field that he wanted to excel in, only to be told 10 years later that he is a White guy, he is not a veteran, too bad? I think that is something that ought to be discussed before we hurt any other people. In any event, I think this is a topic to look at. I think it is certainly one way to cause hard feelings in America. I have talked about Thomas Sowell who wrote a book dealing with affirmative action about 40 years ago now. He pointed out that other countries that went down this path--America's not all the way down the path--but have the same experiences as America. First of all, it begins, and it is supposed to be temporary; 57 years later, it is still here. It is supposed to be restricted to maybe one or two ethnic groups, but here in America, first people of African decent, and then people who never were mistreated in the United States come here and are automatically given preferences based on where their ancestors were born centuries ago. We begin to add other groups. I make another point about why this is relevant, because Joe Biden is also trying to add another preference group. He wants to add Middle Eastern and North African people. Right now, I rattled off all the different backgrounds that we are supposed to be keeping track of, but we don't keep track of people from Algeria or Syria or Iraq, and Joe Biden wants to do that, as well. I think we should have a discussion there. There are not a lot of people in this country with backgrounds from those countries, but there are more and more people coming here. Joe Biden apparently says that if you are from America, and you apply for a job, and we have an immigrant from Algeria or an immigrant from Iraq, people like that should be given preferences. Well, I think maybe that is something we should talk about here a little bit and see what the appropriate course of action is. Whatever the course of action is, it should be after a thorough public discussion, not just something, you know, pushed in under the table because it is a sensitive topic. In any event, I would ask the press to look into this situation. We want to find out what rules President Biden's equity action teams are operating under. We want to have a public discussion. Is it right to add North African and Middle Easterners to this topic? Should we give preferences to people who have no background of discrimination in America, people who just show up and immediately get preferences? I obviously have my strong opinions, but I would like to hear what the pundit class, that so many of us read, has to say. I would like to see maybe sometime the Committee on Education and the Workforce or the Judiciary Committee look into this and see what the different viewpoints are because it affects a lot of Americans. We are kind of moving down this train without having a public discussion. Those are my comments on that topic. I think it is a topic more people ought to look into. I think they ought to review how some people want to destroy America from within. I think they ought to review what happened in other countries as they went down the affirmative action path, be it Nigeria, be it Sri Lanka, be it Malaysia or Singapore, and I think a lot of times it doesn't work out very well. It is something we ought to have a discussion about, and nobody else is talking about it around here, so we throw that open for discussion. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

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