Glenn Grothman

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, the next issue that I think has disappeared a little bit is with regard to COVID. We are now in a dip in new people getting COVID, but I think in the last week we are still around 5,000 people who died of COVID. I think the last four people I have known who have died of COVID really haven't had a lot else wrong with them, maybe nothing else wrong with them. I think there are a couple of things that have been underreported or not focused on. I have railed for almost 2 years here now on vitamin D. There was a study out of Israel that was released fairly recently that said that if you were deficient in vitamin D--and in the study they say deficient being 20 nanograms per milligram, which is pretty deficient--that you would be 11 times more likely to die of COVID. Now, given all the massive amount of ink--if they still use ink--and the massive amount of time that has been spent educating the public on how to avoid COVID or avoid dying from COVID, I would think a little bit more time would be spent by the public health establishment looking at the effects of vitamin D. You are 11 times more likely to die if you are under 20 nanograms. What can we do about that? First of all, it ought to be publicized. Secondly, it should be par for the course that, particularly if you are older and you go in for a checkup, that your doctor gives you a vitamin D test. Right now, your reimbursement levels for that test may not be quite up for the cost. We all know that the medical establishment in America today, particularly the hospitals, are obsessed with money. But people are dying out there. If you test somebody for vitamin D, and they are down around 15 or 17 nanograms, you can alert that person and perhaps save a life. There are all sorts of people walking around with insufficient vitamin D levels. They don't even know it. They don't know the importance of it. I will also point out that they should especially point out the value of vitamin D to people of color. We know people of color are more likely to have low levels of vitamin D, and therefore the incompetence or the failure of the public health establishment not to educate people on vitamin D has disproportionately affected people of color. They talk about people of color a lot in this institution, and I think a lot of times they talk about prejudice that is not there. But here you have something in which people are dying overwhelmingly, and for whatever reason, the public health establishment does not ring the alarm as far as how much darker skin increases the possibility that you are going to get serious COVID. So I beg the CDC and the public health establishment to focus a little bit more on vitamin D. I will also point out that different doctors have different opinions as to how you should treat somebody for COVID, and I have no problem finding doctors who find that drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine given early will save lives, and a lot of times those same doctors feel a drug called remdesivir is not effective. Now, I don't think the subcommittee that we have had here has studied that enough. But with remdesivir, apparently the hospitals--and this is largely the drug companies getting the money--you are going to get billed out over $3,000 a day for the treatment, and the treatment for ivermectin is nominal. I talk to doctors, smart doctors, doctors that are well published, who tell me that they could have saved tens of thousands, maybe over 100,000 lives if doctors could give the off-label drugs that were originally prescribed for another purpose, but the doctors aren't allowed to by the hospitals that they work for. This is a potential scandal. I would think normally the press would be a little bit inquisitive when we say one drug is worth $3,200 a day and one drug is under $50 a day, and smart doctors feel the drug for $50 a day or under $50 a day is more effective. But for whatever reason we don't talk about it. If something wrong is going on around here, the reason they are able to get away with things going on is because the press doesn't highlight it. The reason why hospitals are not giving drugs that some doctors feel are more effective are directives from the NIH. And, again, I think drug companies have too much power in this town, but it is something that should be looked into by the media. It surprises me that some people still aren't aware of this. Conflicts Between Russia and Ukraine

Mr. GROTHMAN. The final thing that we will focus on here a little bit is what is going on in Ukraine. I still feel that for whatever reason, and I have talked about it here, we have not done enough to discuss the Holodomor. The Holodomor was the starvation of 4 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s by the Communist government. At the time, it was underreported in the United States because at that time, for reasons unknown to me--I wasn't around at the time, it is a mystery to me today--The New York Times is perceived to be the paper of record. And The New York Times, a guy by the name of Walter Duranty decided not to talk about the starvation. He decided to keep it secret. Probably because at the time the intellectuals, the type of people who work at the big newspapers, liked to look upon the left favorably, and because it was Communists who were starving people, it is not something they like to talk about. I do not know how you can intelligently talk about the relationships between Ukraine and Russia without talking about the 4 million--and that is the lowest, by the way, other people talk about 15 million-- without talking about the 4 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by the Communist, Marxist government that ran the Soviet Union at that time. I would again ask that our press run special features on the starvation that took place 90 years ago. First of all, when 4 million people are starved, it should be something every American school child knows about anyway; but secondly, when you look at the animosity of the Ukrainians toward the Russians, that certainly plays a big role. I have a sneaking suspicion the reason we don't talk about it is because it is one more embarrassment to the atheistic, totalitarian left that some powerful people in this country like to look up to. So again, I wish that the newspapers would cover the Holodomor, and I wish that the schools would cover it because no school child should be able to graduate from high school without knowing about this. And it is also important so they can be on the lookout for big government atheists, wherever they are. I think you also have to know about what the big government atheists did to understand why we fought in Korea, to see why we fought in Vietnam. But America's school children, quite frankly, well older than school children, are blissfully ignorant of the Holodomor and what can happen if you let a bunch of atheistic big-government types take over the government. The final thing that I am going to focus on here a little bit, I have before thanked President Biden for giving the State of the Union speech and not talking about racism. But I still think one of the problems we have with high crime in this country--and my district borders the city of Milwaukee. The city of Milwaukee, for the second time last year, had the highest murder rate they have ever had. When I was a child, the city of Milwaukee was the safest of the 25 biggest cities in the country. But we have gone downhill. And I think a lot of that is the police have been beat up; they are called racists, and they are afraid to do their job. They are afraid of having a complaint filed against them. We still have a bill floating around Congress saying it should be easier to sue police. And, as a result, we do get these high murder rates. In addition to the high murder rates, we have, together with our lax policy at the border, 100,000 people dying every year from drug overdoses. But, again, it was 45,000 7 years ago. That was high. And I think whether it is 45,000 or 100,000, people's eyes glaze over. If it was your child, if it was your sibling who died of a drug overdose, maybe your eyes wouldn't glaze over. But the media in this country, their eyes have glazed over, and we continue to let people die. So, in conclusion, in any event, my final ask here is that President Biden, who has done what he can to fan the flames of saying police are racist, police are racist, I think it would do a lot toward making it easier to hire police around the country and easier to be an effective policeman if he would publicly apologize to the police of this country for his slandering them and his compatriots slandering them, and tell them what a good job they are doing. So those are some of the issues that I hoped the press would pick up on. In conclusion, I will make one more comment with regard to Ukraine. This is a disaster for Ukraine. It is just a horrible thing. We all feel so good about how brave they are; about the fight they have put up. Eventually, that war has got to end, and I never feel, when I am dealing with members of this administration, or Congress, in general, quite frankly, that there is enough focus on ending the war. There are newspaper reports saying that Israel might be getting involved in trying to negotiate an end. But the United States is still the most important powerful country in the world. And I wish the administration would take a little bit more time negotiating, trying to negotiate an end to that conflict. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Now, there is another issue that is going on, and I think to a certain extent because of Ukraine it has been pushed into the background, but it is still a vitally important issue, and that is what is going on at the border. Just because Kamala Harris has been appointed the Border Patrol czar, and she does absolutely nothing as far as we can tell, and it doesn't mean we should stop talking about this huge tragedy. In February, we had 165,000 encounters with the Border Patrol, up 63 percent over last year. There were about 72,000 people let into the country, and the figures aren't out there, but they can guess that ICE let in another 19,000 more. Of that amount, 9,000 were unaccompanied minors. If an unaccompanied minor shows up at the southern border, we don't turn them back to their parents. They usually write an address on their T-shirt, and we send them off to their aunt or uncle, whoever, you know, it could be just a friend, whatever, and that is just par for the course. We pay to put the little child on the airplane, we pay to ship them somewhere; maybe not their parents, maybe just friends or whatever. If you want to talk about divided families or breaking up families, you look at the current system where every month 9,000 kids who are younger than age 18 are let in this country without their parents. I had a staffer go down there because we had to work late last week, but I will be down there next week. And there were some other observations I made as far as what it is like on the border. Gangs play music on the Mexican side of the border as people march across. It is a festive atmosphere. Nobody even pretends that the United States cares about what is going on at their border. The drug gangs make $3 billion a year, we believe, transporting people here. The charges are between $2,000 and $20,000 to come here because they run that border. It is not in just our Vice President where we have a lack of leadership. The California Highway Patrol can't report illegals they find to ICE because of the, I would almost call it, treasonous behavior of one of our States. Increasingly, we are getting people coming here who not only do they not speak Spanish, they speak an indigenous language from southern Mexico or, more likely, from Central America. They are obviously very difficult to process, and you have to wonder about the wisdom of letting people in this country when nobody can speak their language. We are getting people from Iran, Iraq, and Uzbekistan, which of course are breeding grounds for terrorism. These people are paying up to $20,000 a head to come into this country. Doesn't that concern anybody? The hotels, the airlines in Mexico obviously know this is going on because people take airlines from, for example, Cancun to Mexicali. We know hotels south of the border are being used by illegal immigrants, but because it is becoming so common, it is built into the Mexican economy. Obviously, when we do so little to prevent this illegal immigration, morale from the Border Patrol is low. How would you like it if you are taking a job--and recently they have even been shot at--taking a dangerous job like that and getting as little support from the executive branch as you can imagine? Actually, I did notice in the recent appropriations bill that passed last week, we are putting a lot more money into monitoring the Border Patrol and making sure they are not mistreating people. It is not a big concern for us apparently when an illegal immigrant shoots at a Border Patrol agent, but we have to put millions of dollars more into the budget to make sure the Border Patrol is not breaking the law. No wonder the Border Patrol does not feel good about their situation right now. I will give you another example of the brazenness of the illegals coming here. Right now, migrants aren't afraid to call 911 and get escorted with a ride to where they want to go, and we just taxi them in. If they are kind of wandering around, let's make a 911 call, and they show up. Nothing wrong with them, no healthcare problem, we just use our local emergency services as an escort service. We still have a situation in which people don't have to be tested for COVID. Okay. But it is kind of strange that American citizens, say if you work for a hospital, are required to get a vaccine, and we don't even test you if you are trying to come in this country. What are the priorities here? People coming in from what we call special-interest countries are going up, be it Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, countries like this. So, in any event, I encourage the press, and that encourages the so- called conservative press, or the balanced press, to report to America when we are having 80,000 or 90,000 people cross the border every month, report what type of people are coming here, report on the mass decrease in the number of deportations, as even people who have committed crimes are removed at a much lower rate than they were by Donald Trump. Because I do think if we look back at America 10 years from now and say, how did the policies of 2022 affect America, still the number one most damaging thing is that we ignored our border. I will point out one more thing about ignoring the border. Right now, we do have a crisis in Ukraine. Hopefully, we are not going to have a similar crisis in Taiwan. I have felt all along that an effect of not enforcing our border is to tell foreign leaders who don't like us that we have kind of a wimpy, ineffective, incompetent government in charge right now. Other normal countries do not let 90,000 to 100,000 people a month cross into their country, and leaders around the world look at that, and they, quite frankly, think that the current executive branch of this country is not a serious elected official, and they challenge somebody who is not a serious elected official. There is no doubt in my mind that if we had been enforcing that border and taking a tougher stance in other places around the world, we wouldn't be in this mess in Ukraine like we are today. Issues Surrounding COVID

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Suspending normal trade relations with Russia is important. It is my belief 20 years from now the part of this bill that will most be remembered is the change in the Magnitsky Act, which is normally used to sanction foreign elected officials. Right now, the Magnitsky Act can be used only for defined crimes, extrajudicial killings, torture, prolonged detention without trial. We are now opening up that act to unlimited human rights, however defined, including sanctioning people, for example, not following the LGBTQ agenda, or not being sufficiently pro-abortion. We have heard before this country weighing in on countries like the Dominican Republic, Hungary, African and Latin American countries, using our economic might to punish them when they don't adopt our view or I'd say the liberal view of Christianity. It is with great disappointment that people held out and risked whether this bill would go ahead or not on changing the Magnitsky Act.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, tomorrow, we are going to be addressed by the head of state from Ukraine. I have been talking to people--young people, students, older people-- about if they know the background between those countries, specifically the Holodomor, a starvation of the Ukrainian people that took place in 1932 and 1933. I am shocked. I bet less than 10 percent of Americans know that 4 million--4 to 15 million, but at least 4 million--Ukrainians were starved to death by the Communist government in the early 1930s. Even less, I am sure, know that for misreporting this starvation, a guy by the name of Walter Duranty, from The New York Times, received a Pulitzer Prize for covering it up. So, this leftwing bias out of The New York Times is not something that started today. They, of course, hated the people who were starved because they were independent farmers, and the Communist Party hates independent, family-oriented people.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss a few topics which should be of interest to all Americans. Obviously, many Americans have been glued to their TVs this week to see what is happening in Ukraine and what is going on with the Russians and the way they are treating the Ukrainian people. I would like to emphasize one more time that it amazes me the journalists of this country and the politicians of this country can talk about the two countries, Russia and Ukraine, without talking about the Holodomor. I have asked children, college students, law enforcement officers, journalists. Amazingly, they have gone through 8 or 12 or 16 years of schooling and don't know what it is. The Holodomor took place in 1932 to 1933 when communism had in the last few years taken over Russia and taken over Ukraine. Of course, communists, above all, hate freedom. I don't know if you could describe Russia's communists today--maybe a little more fascist than communist. But at the time, there was no question it was communist, and they didn't like the fact that the farmers, called the kulaks, were, to a degree, free and independent. They were going to crack down on them by taking away their grain and making sure they would starve to death. Now, perhaps because it has not been adequately studied, we don't know how many people were killed by the Communist Party in Ukraine during the years 1932 to 1933, but if you peruse the internet, it is somewhere between 3 and 17 million. Interestingly, at the same time these people were starving, the person The New York Times put on the case was a guy by the name of Walter Duranty, who they have since admitted they recognized he had some significant flaws in his study, but he managed not to report the starvation. The readers of The New York Times at that time thought that things were going great in the Soviet Union and that this might well be the wave of the future. This is what happens when we have people, progressives, whatever you want to call them, who are blind to the inevitable, horrible things that happen when you let the hardcore left, or what I would call the atheistic totalitarian left, take over a country. I would hope, as we talk about Ukraine and Russia, that our media outlets, be it newspaper or otherwise, use this as an opportunity to educate the American public as to how many millions of people starved to death during this time. Every New York Times employee should have to listen to this show upon employment about what happened and about what the readers of The New York Times were not told about during these years. Every journalism major should spend a few classes when they begin journalism school on this topic. No American schoolchild should graduate eighth grade without hearing about the Holodomor. Not only is it a warning for what happens when we let the hardcore left take over, but I don't know how you can understand American history, the last 80 years, unless you know a little bit more about communism. How can American children know why we fought in Korea? How could American children know why we fought in Vietnam? How will American children know what we had a Cold War over? I don't understand how you can talk about Ukraine and Russia without hearing about the first Ukrainian experiences with communism. It is the reason why some people like me are so befuddled why Senator Blumenthal is given kind of a free pass when he shows up at a communist anniversary. It is why people like me find it so offensive that two of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter were Marxists and that organization is treated with respect. This is why I am so concerned when we have owners of high-tech quasi- monopolies try to suppress information hostile to their progressive ideology. Just like in a hardcore leftist state, they would oppress the ability of the local people to find out views on all sorts of opinions. By the way, that is going on in the Soviet Union today. We turn on the TV and we get all sorts of information about what is going on in the Ukraine. The average Russian citizen, whose children are dying in the Ukraine, they don't get to find out what is really going on. Some people call it Communist; some people call it Marxist. I don't think Progressive is exactly the same thing, but clearly Progressive is meant to be further left than Liberal. I would hope that by the time this Ukrainian/Russian situation wraps up that American journalists make sure that everybody knows about the Holodomor. Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to talk about in President Biden's annual speech, I think he got away--because of what happened in the Ukraine--without addressing some of the other problems that are, I think, unaddressed. I am going to talk a little bit about inflation. I am not like my good buddy from Arizona with huge graphs, but I want people to look at this little graph that is on a topic that is normally considered boring: the money supply. Here we have a graph showing the degree to which the money supply goes up year over year. You will notice the money supply, compared to historic levels, went up rather dramatically, sometimes over 6 percent in the 1970s. People like me are old enough to remember that that is when mortgages were 20 percent and inflation was so high. If we look at this graph, we see that recently the money supply went up around 7 percent, then dropped down to almost nothing in the 1990s. It recently has hit a year over year increase of 40 percent. I would hope that President Biden realizes that one of the reasons costs have gone so far up might have something to do with this dramatic increase in the money supply. This is an amazing graph. President Biden--understanding so much about business--has simply advised us the way to deal with inflation is to tell businessmen to cut costs. Well, I will tell you, my district has more manufacturing jobs than any other district in the country and it is also a big agriculture district. When I had a couple weeks off in the past, I toured a lot of factories around my district. One of the things I heard, in addition to the huge labor shortage, is the huge increase in the costs of production, particularly in metals. Aluminum is going through the roof. Metals are up 300, 400, 500 percent compared to a couple years ago. Mr. Speaker, I would ask President Biden: How do you lower costs if the cost of metals that are going into your product are up 300 to 400 percent? I mentioned I also have a big agriculture district, a lot of dairy, some corn, some potatoes. What do I get from the farmers? They are actually very concerned also about their costs of production: feed, fertilizer, chemicals. Again, it is all skyrocketing. It is not a matter of just telling businesses to cut their costs. These are the reasons why inflation is so high and why our young people--who I worry about so much because they should be able to get on with their life, they should be able to build a new house, they should begin to be able to have children. I look at the costs that are necessary to live the American Dream. Housing. Did you ever look at how much the price of a house has gone up the last 18 months? Apartments. Now, I realize the cost of apartments varies dramatically, but in my area you used to be able to get an apartment for $600, $700, $800 a month. Now apartments are being rented for $1,500 a month. I don't know how the young people are going to be able to afford the American Dream unless politicians begin to realize that when you have these big spending programs and the Fed has to print dollars to pay for them, you are inevitably going to get inflation. I beg President Biden and I beg the members of the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee that as we work towards the next budget, we try to hold down the level of spending. It wouldn't be too much to ask if we had year over year no increase in spending at all. I beg President Biden and other members of his party not to push through another massive spending bill. They talk about a $3 trillion bill, and he still dreams of getting it through. If it is not a $3 trillion bill or if they get a $2 trillion or $1 trillion bill, it will further put the price of housing beyond reach of the young people in the country. One of the reasons it is so tempting for politicians to just print more money is because then they can say: I don't know how this increase in prices got here. It is not my fault. Just tell the businessmen to cut costs. It is not a coincidence that we had a lot of inflation in the 1970s when M2 was going up significantly. It is not going to be a coincidence when inflation continues to go up year after year as the business community and the agriculture community tells me it will. If politicians in Washington, in their path to reelection, decide that it means having the Federal Reserve print more money, let the costs go up, and then turn around and tell the American public: I don't know how this happened, tell the businessmen to cut costs. Please address inflation like the great concern it is. Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to address that I don't feel was adequately addressed the other night is the way we treat police in the country. President Biden tried to address spending on police. It is true that particularly in big cities with strong Democrat city councils, strong Democrat mayors, they have not treated the police well the last few years. I don't think President Biden addressed what I believe is the big reason why police have not been as effective in holding down the homicide rates compared to a few years ago. I think the major reason is that cheap politicians are out there lying and telling the public that they are racist. They are saying we ought to sue them, they are saying that we ought to pass legislation here in which it will make it easy to sue them. You wind up in a situation where the police become passive. As bad as the reduction in the number of police is, I think this constant harping on racism and the police and let's make it easier to sue them makes matters even worse. I want to commend President Biden, he didn't talk about racism on Tuesday night, and that was a great improvement from his inaugural speech where it was kind of like all racism, white supremacy, blah, blah, blah. It would be nice if he would use the forum of the annual State of the Union address to apologize to the police of the country and educate the American public that the police, by and large in this Nation, are not racist. When you look at studies, and there are a variety of studies we can pull up here, a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that White police officers were less likely than police officers of color to shoot unarmed Black suspects, for example. When you adjust, sadly, for violent crimes committed, again, you don't find this racism. In an effort to win the next election--and they had success in the last election--again and again politicians are tearing down police departments and threatening to have the police sued. It is not surprising when the police become very passive, knowing that if you arrest somebody you could get a complaint filed against you; knowing that if you have to handcuff somebody or tackle somebody that there are politicians out there that want you to be sued. It is not surprising if the police become passive. In the big, urban city closest to my heart, Milwaukee, where I was born and where my district is right up against, 2 years ago we hit the all-time record by a mile in murders. I didn't think it could get any higher, but they broke the record again last year. I know if you talk to the police--they won't say it publicly--but they aren't policing the way they could 10 years ago because they are afraid they might get in trouble, they might get complaints, they might get sued or whatever. They back off and a lot of people have paid for that backing off with their lives. Mr. Speaker, I strongly wish President Biden would change his tune, stop pushing bills that make it easy to sue police, and above all, change the tone of discussion about policing in this country by admitting how un-racist the police are in this Nation and bring out more respect for them and allow police to not be afraid to do their job. Mr. Speaker, the next issue that I would like to address--and I wish President Biden would have used his opportunity on Tuesday night to address--he mentioned COVID and COVID deaths go up and COVID deaths go down. We still have about 1,500 people a day dying of COVID. I have known four people, who I think were relatively healthy, who passed away in the last 4 months of COVID. We shouldn't forget about it. There are some things I have talked about COVID, and for whatever reason the public health establishment--and I think to a degree the President does control the public health establishment--have not addressed vitamin D. There were studies that came out of Israel this week that they should have advertisements on all over this country. Israel found that patients with a vitamin D deficiency--and I think a vitamin D deficiency was described under 30-nanograms per milliliter--were 14 times more likely to have a severe or critical case of COVID-19 than those people with sufficient vitamin D in their system. The mortality rate for those who had insufficient vitamin D levels was over 25 percent compared to 2.3 percent. In other words, you were more than 12 times as likely to die of COVID if you didn't have adequate vitamin D in your system. I don't know why the public health establishment won't talk about this more. I have been talking about it for almost 2 years now. I realize that you can get nice bottles of vitamin D for $15 or $20 at Walgreens or wherever, so nobody is going a make a lot of money on it. And certainly, there are a lot of ways people made a lot of money with COVID so far. I do believe that if they pushed vitamin D--not everybody would believe the commercials and not everybody would follow through--but I think it is entirely possible that you would reduce the number of fatalities by one-half. I asked President Biden to weigh in with his agencies and weigh in with the CDD or NIH, and have them educate the public on the huge potential savings in lives if Americans would have an adequate amount of vitamin D. I don't like breaking out people of different ethnic backgrounds, but right now people of color are much more likely to be vitamin D deficient than people of European descent. So by not trumpeting from the rooftops that vitamin D can save your lives, you are unquestionably disproportionately causing people of color to die of this horrible disease. I realize there are other things that could be done. Mr. Speaker, I will repeat here: insufficient vitamin D levels, 25.6 mortality rate compared to 2.3 percent with adequate levels. People with vitamin D deficiency are 14 times more likely to have a severe or critical case of COVID. Why does the average person not know this? I tell them when I run into them, but I can't talk to everybody. It would be nice if the public health establishment would talk a little bit more about that. One other thing, by the way, I was hoping on COVID he would do, the protocol of a lot of hospitals is to determine the drugs they prescribe by what is recommended out of the big agencies in the government. And there are a lot of very intelligent people who feel that we would have saved a lot of people if we could have used off-label drugs rather than the $3,000-a-day remdesivir. In other words, they felt there were better drugs that would probably cost one-hundredth of the amount of the drug that was being pushed out of CDC. It would be nice in America, the land of the free, if we would allow doctors in hospitals to use these other drugs. I think, again, Mr. Speaker, you would have significant savings compared to where we stand right now. These are some of topics that I think were not addressed and should have been addressed and would save lives if appropriately addressed in the State of the Union. We will mention one more because we have a little bit of time here. President Biden, to his credit, pointed out that a lot of people are dying from illegal drugs. He didn't exactly have any concrete proposals as to what to do. When I got this job 7 years ago, 47,000 Americans were dying every year from illegal drug overdoses. Fifty-seven thousand people died in 12 years in the Vietnam war. And they made a big deal about that when I was a child. Now you have 47,000 in 1 year, Mr. Speaker, when I got elected. Do you know what it is now, Mr. Speaker? One hundred thousand. It is as if we are having two Vietnam wars every year, and the politicians hardly talk about it. Now, I think one of the reasons President Biden wouldn't come up with anything concrete is that almost all the fentanyl--a drug which he wouldn't even mention by name which is responsible for most of these deaths--almost all of the fentanyl is coming across the southern border, and, of course, our President doesn't like to talk about the southern border because we have a largely open southern border in which 90 to 100,000 people every month are coming across. It also may mean a little bit more of an aggressive law enforcement going after the people who sell the fentanyl. But, of course, we can't say we should have more aggressive law enforcement, and we can't say that more drug dealers should wind up in prison because then we would have more in prison. So rather than doing these things, why don't we just let 100,000 people a year die? Some people can say drug possession and sale of drugs is a victimless crime. I say if you think about the parents or the spouses or the children or the siblings of the 100,000 people who die, I don't know how we cannot do more to address this problem. I would hope that next year in the State of the Union speech President Biden does a little more to address the 100,000 people who are dying of drug overdoses and does a little more to address the perhaps hundreds of thousands of people whose lives could be saved if we freed up doctors to prescribe whatever drugs they wanted to and if we would have pushed a little bit more vitamin D. I think we would have a much more well-informed electorate if the educational system and the journalist establishment did a little more to educate the public about the Holodomor. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to comment a little bit on the speech last night and some of the issues that have been ignored and should be addressed and some of the issues that were given such short shrift it was almost comical. The first issue I would like to address is inflation. Next time I should get my own billboard here. But if you look at M2, which is one measure of the monetary supply, in the 1970s--and I am old enough to remember the 1970s when inflation was really a horrible thing and something that we were never supposed to repeat--M2 was going up at a rate of about 7 percent year over year. We now are up about 37 percent year over year. I mean, if you look at a graph, it is shocking the degree to which the Federal Reserve is just flooding money into our system. Of course, a major reason why they have had to do this is wildly excessive spending, because if you have excessive spending and foreign governments do not want to buy your debt, and who would want to buy your debt, you wind up with no alternative but to degrade the value of the dollar. I thought it was particularly amazing that the President said or told businesses that you have to ``lower your costs,'' meaning that we shouldn't reduce wages, which is fine, but like it is an easy thing to lower your costs. I wonder, has President Biden ever actually talked to the businesses who are raising their prices? The first thing I hear about is the metals, the aluminum, the different kinds of steel that are up 300, 400, 500 percent. When the market, the cost of these things go up to that degree, and you are a businessman, what in the world are you supposed to do? The cost of transportation is going up, and the amount we pay truckers, which is a tremendously good occupation, has gone up. Sometimes you can't even get trucks. And what has President Biden done? He imposes a vaccine mandate on truckers, which further reduces the supply of an occupation that is already in demand, thereby guaranteeing the cost is going to continue to go up even more. I strongly encourage President Biden to have some of his staff run around Washington, D.C., or maybe run around and talk to some of the factory owners in this country and ask them or advise them what they are supposed to do to ``lower their costs.'' Most of them, because we have a shortage of people working, are already probably exceeding last year's output in product. Despite the fact that they are doing that, and so, therefore, they are getting more per hour worked, but they can't find any new ways to reduce costs. But, again, I hope President Biden sends some of his cabinet members around the country and either advises them on how it is going to be easy to lower your costs or hears from them how impossible it is for them to lower their costs. By the way, every single manufacturer I have talked to in the last 2 months--and I bet I have talked to 15, 20--every one of them thinks inflation is going to get worse. When I talk to farmers who use a variety of fertilizers, whatever, that goes into their product, they see the costs going through the roof. And every single farmer I talk to thinks inflation is going to get worse. So I strongly encourage the Biden administration to have some people get out there among the hoi polloi and find out what is really going on with regard to inflation. Next, President Biden talked about the police. And maybe President Biden doesn't realize what the problem he and his allies have created by going after the police. In Milwaukee, the city just to the south of my district, there was a dramatic increase to an all-time record high number of murders in 2020, something that you never thought you would see again, and it was exceeded again in 2021. Why is that happening? It is because President Biden and his allies have adopted an antipolice rhetoric, in particular implying an amount of racism out there, and they are pushing a bill that has already been through this House, a bill that will make it much easier to hire a policeman. Now, if a policeman wants to do his job, sometimes they have to arrest people, sometimes they have to wrestle with people. If you can wind up being sued, you are much less likely to want to do that. And when you have police that are less engaged, particularly in our busiest cities, what are you going to get? More crime. We cannot say we are serious about the spiraling number of people who are being shot to death or stabbed to death in this country until we allow the police to be police again. We have got to stop that police hatred that goes on. And I don't care whether we eventually send a few hundred million dollars around the country to hire more police or whatever President Biden has up his sleeve, what we have got to do is we have got to build respect for police again so that they are free to maintain the safety in this country. The third thing I will look at that I thought, again, was misleading to the public, concerns election laws. Many States, including Wisconsin, have a photo ID law. President Biden and his acolytes imply that a photo ID law is motivated by racism. Again, this is unnecessarily divisive. One of the reasons why I feel that Joe Biden is the most divisive President in my lifetime, I have praised him for his speech last night in which he didn't call this country racist after using the racial word or white supremacy so much in his inaugural speech; nevertheless, it is a little bit ridiculous when in order to have fair elections some of us want to have photo ID and then people stand around when photo ID is needed for things that probably have a much more dramatic impact on the average person's life, but it doesn't bother them. We had a requirement here in town that you present proof of vaccine with which you had to produce a photo ID, if you wanted to go to a restaurant in this town. I would say it is a fairly significant thing. Did anybody say that the District of Columbia was being racist because they required a photo ID if I want to eat at a restaurant? They want to look at my ID before I get in an airplane. If I had to fly somewhere to get some surgery, if I had to fly somewhere to see an ailing relative, that could be a real life-changing experience. Does anybody say, oh, it is racist to require a photo ID if I got on an airplane? We just put up with this routinely. Nevertheless, President Biden fans the flames of division by claiming that those of us who want to make sure that we have fair elections are motivated by racism when photo IDs are needed so commonly. The next thing I want to point out that I think he gave short shrift to with an insultingly small amount of time was the huge number of people who are dying of drug overdoses in this country. I got this job only 7 years ago. At the time, 47,000 people a year died of drug overdoses. By comparison, in 12 years during the Vietnam war, 57,000 people died. And every politician was supposed to talk about it. Now we shoot up from 47,000 to 100,000 people, and President Biden can't even bring himself to talk about fentanyl, the drug responsible for most of those deaths. I don't know why he wouldn't talk about fentanyl. My guess is because overwhelmingly it is coming across the southern border, and he doesn't want to do anything about the southern border. However, I would hope in the future, President Biden would meet with law enforcement around the country, find out what it is like to have to tell the parents or siblings or children of the people who have died that their relative has died. That is a horrible thing. And I think to gloss over the 100,000 deaths we have every year in this country--twice the number of people who died in the 12 years in Vietnam--was I thought very callous. But, again, I would encourage President Biden to ask members of his administration to get out and about a little bit, talk to relatives of people who have died of drug overdoses, particularly fentanyl, and maybe it will cause him to devote a little bit more time on that in next year's State of the Union address when he realizes what a horrible situation we have. There are many other things that I don't think were addressed accurately or in depth during the State of the Union address that should have been.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, with regard to what is going on in Ukraine, I stand with everybody in saying it is an absolutely horrific thing. If the United States can keep Ukraine and free Ukraine, that is what we should all be hoping and praying for. We heard a speech last night, in addition to the very relevant numbers, and in addition to the numbers of people dying in Ukraine and the people being injured, we cannot forget that every month in America another 90,000 people cross our southern border. We cannot forget that every month in America 8,000 more people die of drug overdoses. We cannot forget in America, compared to 3 years ago, we deport, every month, approximately 6,000 less people from this country for committing crimes. Madam Speaker, I realize a lot is going on around the world and it is easy to forget about it, but America should not allow its politicians to forget about this huge sea of people crossing the border and the huge number of people dying of drug overdoses and the broken hearts of their parents, their siblings, and their children.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, as we break here for a recess, it is important to remember that COVID is still a very serious threat, and a little under 2,000 people a day are dying of it. I have been contacted by medical professionals in my district who feel there is too much pressure to use remdesivir and not enough opportunity to use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to treat this horrific disease. This is unprecedented that people would step in. As I understand it, hospitals are billing out over $3,000 a day for remdesivir, but they may be getting under $50 or $60 a day for ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. The combination of doctors being prevented from doing what they want and the fact that some people are making a lot more money on one drug than the other is something the press should be looking into, and it is something I think our Oversight and Reform Committee should be looking into. I hope if anybody is paying attention, you pick up on this story and see what the real background is. I am not an expert on the topic, but experts on the topic do believe that people are dying unnecessarily.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, tonight, we are going to address three what I consider key issues that have sadly been left largely untouched by the American media. The first one is the penalties against married couples in income transfer payments and the degree to which these income transfer payments are going to be affected by the Build Back Better bill, if any of that survives for passage at the end of the year. We know that Karl Marx wanted to destroy the American family. We know for a while, last year, Black Lives Matter, which was so important in last year's campaign, had on their website that they wanted to destroy the Western-prescribed nuclear family. As a practical matter, this means they wanted to keep the man out of the house. People might wonder why I keep bringing this up. It seems like old news. I would feel better if some Democrat stepped forward and publicly condemned Marxism and publicly praised the idea that children may benefit from having a father at home. But that is not going on. In America, before Lyndon Johnson came in with his Great Society, or war on marriage, whatever you want to call it, all but 7 percent of American children started out with both parents. Now, I know wonderful single parents. I know children who became wonderful adults raised by single parents. But nevertheless, the statistics again and again show, whatever metric you have, you might be better off or it might be easier to raise that child with two parents at home. After the Gingrich reforms in the 1990s, that number has since stayed at about 40 percent of children born without both parents at home. So it went from 7 percent to 40 percent, a steady increase 35 years after Lyndon Johnson passed his war on marriage bills in the 1960s. Things have been relatively static for the last 25 years. Now, in my opinion, the reason the number of families with both parents at home dropped is because most government transfer payments are conditioned upon not having a lot of income or not having a major breadwinner in the house. There are about 90 government transfer payments this is true of. But some of the ones that the average person should be aware of are SNAP, the food stamp program; the low-income housing program; the earned income tax credit program; the Pell grants; and the TANF program. All of these programs are designed to disappear if you have a person who makes an average income in the household. In Build Back Better, the earned income tax credit goes up. Joe Biden increased the food stamp benefits on his own, and there will be large increases in the amount of low-income housing available. I want to point out one of the programs, by the way, that we used to build more low-income housing. It is called section 42 housing. It is funded by very generous tax credits, which come from, obviously, very wealthy property developers. As a practical matter, the government winds up paying for over 80 percent of the housing that a private person gets through the tax credits. So one of the primary benefits of this form of low-income housing is we are, quite frankly, making the rich richer. It is one of the big tax benefits that helps the wealthier people. In section 42, because so much of the housing is paid for by the government, the person who does the building has every incentive to make that property as expensive as it can be. We are glad the Chair is listening here because it is something I didn't know about until about 6 years ago. It creates a situation in which a developer who is building low- income housing can outbid another developer for prime land, and they can build fancier countertops, that sort of thing, because the government is paying for 80 percent of it. So if you are somebody like me, who sometimes thinks our tax code does benefit the ultrawealthy, section 42 is one of those provisions. Pell grants are another example of a program that you can benefit from, either you or your children, provided nobody in the household is making too much money. It is another program therefore designed--as one mother told me: Me and my husband work. My poor kids have to take out such big student loans. Is it fair we are penalized for being married and working? That is the way that program is set up. It is designed to penalize the old-fashioned family, which is what Karl Marx would have wanted. It is not unusual to have situations in which the penalty for getting married can be as much as $14,000. Like I said, as we have more low- income housing, as we up the earned income tax credit, these programs are pushing, I think, America in the wrong direction. I will direct people who are listening to recent studies that have been put out by The Heritage Foundation and Robert Rector, who has long been an expert in this field, describing the degree to which the penalty on people who get married goes up. Now, I would hope, for children in the future, that we don't continue down this path of apparently penalizing both parents for staying in the home. I hope it is something that is looked at by Republicans if we get the majority, and I hope more Democrats look into this before we add too many other benefits conditioned upon a low-income situation if Build Back Better is passed. Again, I think it would be good if the press, which hasn't so far-- but I would hope the press would pick up on Mr. Rector's paper and comment on how America will change if more and more benefits are targeted at people who are not married with children. I think this is one of the key stories in America over the last 50 years. I hear a lot of people back home, when they feel that America is not quite as enjoyable to live in as it was 50 years ago, that one of those reasons is what they would refer to as the breakdown of the traditional family. I hope, after hearing my explanation tonight, more people realize that that was not necessarily by accident. There are evil, leftwing people who want to break down the family, and the public policy of the American Government right now is to use their financial incentives to penalize the average family. Now, the next issue that, if we look 15 years down the road--and I always think when we take up issues or address issues or decide how to vote on issues, we should say: How is this going to affect America not only today but 15 years from now? I do believe that the screwed-up welfare system continues to chip away at America. But I would say the second-biggest--maybe the biggest--issue is what is going on at our southern border. Earlier today, I had the chance to talk to a member of the Border Patrol, who appeared here in the Capitol. Having seen the border five times last year, I thought I had my fill of bad things that are going on. But talking to him as far as what is going on right now, it is worse than ever. They are seeing more people and more drug gangs operating near the border. We are at a point in which we are not only seeing Mexican drug gangs hanging out in California, fighting for the marijuana fields that are apparently popping up in California, but they are now fighting with Chinese gangs. I mean, I have been down there several times. I have yet to see them, but this Border Patrol agent told me what we have going on in California is violent conflict between Mexican gangs and Chinese gangs, and they are becoming more aggressive. You didn't used to see people coming to the border shooting at Border Patrol agents, but that is what we are getting now. In the past, when I have been down there, they would avoid the Border Patrol agents. Now, you really have to look out. I mention that because I think as we work our way through a continuing resolution today and work toward the budget, we had better do something to help out the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol right now has to deal with a lot more people than they did a year ago. When President Biden took office, there were about 20,000 people coming across here every month. We are now at about 90,000 every month, including a lot more unaccompanied children. Obviously, when people turn themselves in at the southern border, which they do under our asylum policy, the Border Patrol agents have to drop what they are doing, ignore the border, and do the paperwork. There is even more paperwork when we have unaccompanied minors coming to the southern border because then we have to check out the young children, and we ship them around the country, wherever they have to go. Now, this drives the Border Patrol up the wall--right?--because if somebody in this room took their children and dropped them off at the Washington, D.C., airport and just told the Southwest ticket agent, ``Oh, here is Johnny. Send him to somebody in Portland, Oregon,'' social services would be after those people. Why are you letting those people go? But at the southern border, it doesn't work that way. If Johnny shows up at the southern border and has on his T-shirt, ``I want to go to 14 East Elm Street, Portland, Oregon,'' we deliver him to 14 East Elm Street, Portland, Oregon, no questions asked. I mean, presumably, Johnny knows those people. Hopefully, it is an aunt and uncle or grandparents. Hopefully, it is somebody, but we don't know for sure. That is the reason there is a report that the U.S. Government will lose track of one in three unaccompanied alien children it releases to sponsors into the country. We don't even know where these kids are. I don't know, for whatever reason--maybe it is that they like the current administration--there are not banner headlines about this, but there should be banner headlines about it. Like I said, if it were our own children just released to the airlines to go around the country, we would be concerned. I have been at the southern border. I have watched as I flew out of McAllen, Texas, and watched all the people getting on the airplanes, children getting on the airplane, and people getting on the plane without identification. Again, you and I, we have to turn in our driver's license. ``Here I am. Can you let me get back to Milwaukee?'' That is not the way it works with the illegal immigrants. They are let in, and it is a recipe for trouble. But the one primary thing I took out today was, again, the large number of people coming into the country. I should point out, too--and this says something about the administration's motivation. In the first 6 months of last year, about 85 percent less people were deported than 3 years ago. Some of that can be attributed to COVID, but we largely know how to deal with COVID today. So, you begin to get even more suspicious of the administration, that not only are they greatly increasing the number of people who come into the country, but they are dramatically decreasing the number of people with criminal records who are being deported from the country. How can America survive? Again, when I look at Congress, when I look at what we should do, I say: What effect is this going to have over the next 15 years? We are right now accepting people who we know very little about. I mentioned they don't need IDs. The last time I was down at the southern border, you looked at a path, which was maybe as wide as this table, and it was littered with ID's as people from wherever--Venezuela, Colombia, Chili, wherever--throw their ID's out, I guess because they want to start a new life and don't want the American government to know who they are, I guess. That is how we are changing America. That is how we are determining who the new people coming into America are, rather than, if we really want to, doing something under the current system where people have to check in, where people are monitored, where there is some vetting process. Why you would do it this way if you cared about the future of America, I don't know. And I felt more sorry than ever for some of the people in California who are having these drug gangs buy up houses, sometimes at heightened rates, but are also buying up houses that they are using for their operations. Of course, very quickly, those neighborhoods change if you have drug cartels owning houses in a given area. Now, I am going to address one final issue tonight, and I am a little frustrated at the media not bringing it up. As I have said before, I am not the most hawkish person on the Ukraine-Russian situation, but since Russia and Ukraine are in the news, you would figure the media, including the conservative media, which hasn't been that loud about it, but any impartial media person would take it upon themselves to talk about the Ukrainian famine. In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union controlled what happened in Ukraine, and they were mad at Ukraine because some people in Ukraine wanted to be independent and hadn't been under the Communist heel enough. Ukraine was a very wealthy region as far as agriculture was concerned, so in order to punish the Ukrainians or make sure the Soviet Union took over Ukraine, they instituted a famine. They wouldn't let Ukrainians leave the country. They took over the crops in Ukraine. It dramatically differs if you look up the numbers, but somewhere between, say, 4 and 15 million people starved to death in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Now, isn't that news? If you were a well-informed, well-read American who went to middle school, went to high school, maybe did some college, shouldn't you know that 4 to 14 million Ukrainians were starved to death by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s? But I talk to people. I talk to people in this building. I talk to people back home. Somehow, nobody knows it. Well, maybe that has something to do with some of the animosity between Ukrainians and the Russians. Regardless, it is something every American should know so they know why people like me are a little bit concerned when we are nice to groups founded by Marxists or when a U.S. Senator from Connecticut shows up at an anniversary for the Communist Party of America and thinks it is no big deal and we can just laugh it off. There are many, many things wrong with communism. Suppression of free speech and the free flow of ideas is one of the things that is scary. It was not uncommon in places like Red China or the Soviet Union early on to wipe out all houses of worship. That is something that we find scary, as well as complete government control of the economy and a situation in which they determine that your success economically will, to a certain extent, be dependent upon following the line and bowing to the government. I cannot imagine a worse form of government than that of communism. It is horrible, even without the mass murders. But every American child should know about the great Ukrainian famine of 1931 and 1932 and the millions of people who died, both so they are knowledgeable on Marxism or communism and to know a little bit about historic Ukrainian-Russian relations. So, I beg our media to recount what happened. It would be a good time to recount what happened for the American public, and I hope in the future members of the American education system do a little bit better job of explaining some of the horrific things that happened in history. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I, as well, support this bill. This is a bipartisan bill, and people have to realize it has to be a bipartisan bill. I don't think either party could get 218 votes for this bill, and of course, the same thing is true in the U.S. Senate. Therefore, it can't be a bill for extreme people. There are probably some people who want to get rid of the post office and just see what happens. Those people are going to vote against the bill. However, this is a bill in part negotiated by our current Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. I think he has done a tremendous job. For years, people have said we ought to run the post office like a business. Now, we have a businessman who doesn't need the job, and he has negotiated a package. Admittedly, some people not normally known to sign have signed off. But it is a good package that will save money. If this package doesn't pass today, we will probably deal with another package in 2 or 4 years that is not as good as this package. We are including new machines, which will improve efficiency. We are going to switch to more full-time people, which will result in less overtime. We are going to align the distribution network, and there will be transportation savings there. These things may not happen in the future. I think Mr. DeJoy has done a good job. I think we should stand with him. I think if we do not vote for this bill today, we are really sending a message that we cannot vote for something unless it is absolutely perfect. I do believe there will be a substantial savings over the next few years, a savings which would not result if this bill would fail today. I strongly encourage my colleagues, including my conservative colleagues, to vote for this bill.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to add a few additional things about fentanyl. I first got here about 7 years ago, and at the time there were 47,000 deaths caused by illegal drugs a year. By comparison, there were 57,000 people who died in Vietnam, but that was over a 10-year period, a 12- year period. This is over 1 year, 47,000 people. And it was a national crisis. And every politician had to address that crisis. Well, 7 years later what became of that statistic, 47,000 deaths a year from fentanyl? It went up to 100,000 deaths a year. Now, I have been at the border five times. Every time I am down there the Border Patrol, again and again, emphasizes that with this open flow of people coming into this country, you're getting unlimited fentanyl. So we have to do two obvious things to address the problem. We just passed a continuing resolution today with some increases in there, but the budget proposed by our President doesn't increase funding for the Border Patrol at all. You go through that budget, 12 percent over here, 18 percent over here, 7 percent over here. Border Patrol, nothing. Like these lives don't matter at all. We have got to spend more money at the border. Secondly, when it comes down to penalties for people who are selling this fentanyl or trafficking in fentanyl, they are not great enough. Right now, your penalties for heroin, which is a fraction as lethal as fentanyl, are much higher, the mandatory minimums, than the cutoff for fentanyl. I have introduced a bill that is going to deal with that called the Fentanyl Penalties Parity Act, which adjusts the mandatory minimum to be the same as heroin. So we have got to throw more people in prison. That 100,000 deaths, by the way, that is not what we call nonviolent. Ask the parents of the people who died of these fentanyl overdoses whether that is just a nonviolent crime, and we will slap somebody on the wrist and who cares? We have got to up the penalties on people who are selling that fentanyl. We had 560 people die in Milwaukee County alone last year, and Milwaukee County is not that big. And secondly, we have got to do something at that border. The idea that these fentanyl drugs continue to flow across the southern border, and we can pretend there is nothing we can do, that we can continue to allow Kamala Harris to look out at the border, which is just like a joke on the American people. It is a joke on anybody who has had a loved one die of this fentanyl. That has got to end. I hope everybody in this building, those people fortunate enough to meet the President tell him, Get Kamala Harris off that border and get us some more Border Patrol agents down there so it shows that we are taking the lives of these 100,000 people a year a little more seriously.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to address the COVID pandemic. A lot of people are kind of bored and tired of hearing about it, but with 2,000 lives lost a day, we shouldn't keep our eye off the ball. It seems to be most of the focus or time spent is on masks, government shutdowns, and vaccines. But some doctors in my district feel that the treatment, once people get to the hospital, is to blame. I hope our special committee looks at the treatment people get in the hospital, analyzing remdesivir and its cost of well over $3,000 a day, to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, together with the shortage of monoclonal antibodies. Doctors in my district feel tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives could be saved if people were given something else once they got in the hospital. And just because that may not be as sexy or interesting, I think it is something our special subcommittee ought to take up and see if they can save some lives. It might take some standing up to the pharmaceutical industry.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Much of the police hatred that we get stems from horribly divisive politicians like President Biden, who claim that Black children must be taught to tolerate racist abuse from police just to make it home. President Obama also had quotes encouraging police hatred by screaming racism. Let's look at the facts as pointed out by Heather Mac Donald in an excellent article in The Wall Street Journal. Sadly, groups who are involved in crime are more likely to get in confrontations with police. Fifty-three percent of homicide offenders in America and 60 percent of robberies are committed by the same demographic that Black Lives Matter purports to help. Study after study after study analyzing the statistics shows no racism. Other studies show that Black and Brown policemen are more likely to shoot suspects than White officers, also inconsistent with the racial narrative. You might say why discuss this issue? Who cares if we lie and tear down the police? I suggest that the Congressmen around here all make an effort to do a ride-along with the police. See what great, selfless human beings they are before you scream racism without cause. Furthermore, police are human, and when you keep calling police racists, I think sometimes police have a tendency to back off and become less assertive. And that is one of the major reasons a big city near me, the city of Milwaukee, for 2 years in a row we have had massive, record numbers of homicides in the city. That is what happens when the police become cowed and less effective. It has resulted, I think, in dozens of murders in Milwaukee that would not have happened without the racist antipolice groups. And by groups, I point out, not only politicians, but the NFL has encouraged police dislike with their Black Lives Matter support in the stadiums. Stand up to the cheap politicians tearing down the police. Stand up to the billionaires who own the NFL and fan the flames of anti-race feelings, and stand with the police of America who are doing a tremendous job.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, as we go on recess for a couple of days, I want to call, one more time, attention to Robert Rector's article in The Heritage Foundation talking about the one group in America that is genuinely discriminated against: the hardworking middle class with a nuclear family with a dad. As Rector points out, changes made in the Build Back Better Act, particularly a lot more money for low-income housing, will create up to a $14,000 penalty that nuclear families will face when the husband and wife get married as opposed to a single family. This is true, and this does not include other things such as, for example, Pell grants. I know the Democrat Party wants to give free college to illegal immigrants, whereas if you are a child with a mom and dad at home working, Madam Speaker, you have to go deeply in debt. I strongly want people in this institution to focus on the nuclear family, a sizeable segment of the population, and stop discriminating against them. Give them the same things that the more favored classes get.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, the Biden immigration policy has been well-documented. We have gone from about 20,000 people a month being let in the country to 90,000. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of people kicked out of the country has fallen over 80 percent. What will the result be? More people on welfare, more crime, more drugs--particularly fentanyl--more people untested for COVID. But there is something else--because apparently that doesn't bother the Biden administration--they ought to think about: You appear weak. You may not care, but believe me, all normal people around the world, when they see we are not enforcing immigration laws, they say we have a weak President. And when countries like Russia or China and North Korea and Iran size up the United States, they look at your border policy and say, we are dealing with a weak person. And all these decisions, which are very difficult decisions to be made with all these countries, are going to be that much more difficult to make because you, Mr. President, are defining weakness in your immigration policy. That is the price that you will pay.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, President Biden and the progressives frequently talk about equity and prejudice, and they think we have a lot of discrimination in this country and that some people are treated better than others. I don't think that is a problem. I think his remarks are solely designed to tear down America and create resentments. I look at my own district of people of non-European descent, and whether I look at the Hmong from Laos or Sikhs from India, I see people who come here and grew up in lands in which their native tongue wasn't even English, mostly their religion was not Christianity, and they are thriving in America. But there is one group in the United States in general and Joe Biden in particular, if you look at his Build Back Better bill, Madam Speaker, seems to hate overtly, and there is discrimination against this group: married couples with children. Karl Marx was, of course, against the nuclear family because it was self-supporting and perhaps educated the children in morals and values that may be different from what the government wants. He wanted the government to raise the children. Black Lives Matter, which played a central role in retaining the majority for the Democrats last November, had on its website that its goal was to get rid of the Western-prescribed nuclear family until it was taken down. By the way, that is one of the most dishonest statements ever. Families with mom, dad, and kids are from all around the world. They are from Asia, from South America, and from Africa. The idea that an old-fashioned nuclear family is only European is preposterous, but nevertheless, that is what they say. But I get it. There are people in this world who don't want the father supporting the family. Now, let's look at what is going on in the Build Back Better bill. Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation has done a fine analysis of the effect of Build Back Better on nuclear families. Frequently, welfare programs disincentivize work and disincentivize marriage. How they do it is obvious. If you work harder, you don't get those benefits, be it low-income housing, be it SNAP, be it Medicaid. The harder you work, they begin to take away benefits. Furthermore, these programs discourage marriage because if a mother-- usually the mother--marries a man who has a decent income, then she is no longer considered in poverty. And, again, all the programs--the daycare, the earned income tax credit, and the SNAP--disappear. This is why I call what happens in the Build Back Better bill a part of the war on marriage. This began with Lyndon Johnson--for my money, the worst President this country has ever had, and not for the way he conducted the Vietnam war. I am old enough to remember when you talked about Lyndon Johnson, that was the horrible thing you said--but for what developed into a war on marriage. It is hard to believe, but when they started the welfare system in the 1960s, only 7 percent of children were born out of wedlock. That number is now 40 percent. It has stayed pretty static since the 1990s, but it is clear in the Build Back Better bill that President Biden is trying to push that number up above 40 percent. I recently heard of a young girl being advised by her mother to get pregnant, not to get pregnant and get married, but to get pregnant because it would open up a variety of government benefits, and mom felt this was the way to go through life. Build Back Better--and it depends which benefits we are looking at-- could increase the number of benefits, when put on everything else, to up to a $14,000 penalty for getting married. In other words, we do what we can to discourage marriage. SNAP, earned income tax credit, childcare, and low-income housing, as well as more narrowly tailored programs such as Pell grants or TANF, all carry marriage penalties with themselves. That is exactly what will happen if people come off the waiting list for the generous increases in low-income housing and take the benefit of that low-income housing together with an increase in the earned income tax credit and an increase in the SNAP. Madam Speaker, you can wind up getting $11,000 more for making this decision. Just like Karl Marx wanted: get the man out of the household. I know so much of the focus of the Build Back Better bill is just on the spending package and the effect it will have on inflation, and that is true. People like to focus on giving free college to illegal immigrants, which still amazes me, and that is bad, too. But I really think if the bill were to pass, what it will be remembered for is a big shot in the arm toward the type of people who do not want an old- fashioned nuclear family. It is something that I haven't heard the press cover. Robert Rector's Heritage Foundation's study is something that we will make public within the next 2 or 3 days. When it is made public, I hope our press corps pays a little bit of attention to the shift that this bill will have toward making it more economically advantageous to not have two parents in the household. The next topic that I would like to address concerns the issue in the news involving Ukraine. I am not personally the most hawkish Member here regarding Ukraine, but what amazes me about this conflict is that more is not written about the Holodomor. I have talked to people in this building, talked to young people, and they don't even know what the Holodomor is. In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin, the Communist dictator of the Soviet Union, had a problem in Ukraine. Some of the people in Ukraine wanted to go back and be an independent country, which it was for a while a few years before that. Some of the people in Ukraine, particularly the farmers, which were called kulaks, didn't like the idea of giving up their land and going to work for the government. Of course, one of the things that Communists like is they want everybody working for the government because they want to have total control over everybody. I am sure the problem in Ukraine in the early thirties is similar to what we have in Wisconsin. We have a lot of small dairy farmers. They own their own land and their own business, and they wouldn't take kindly to the idea of a Marxist government coming over and saying: This is no longer your land. These are no longer your cows. You are working for us, the government. So the way Joseph Stalin decided to deal with it is he decided to starve out the people in Ukraine. He decided to put troops around Ukraine so you couldn't escape. And he decided to take the crops and take the produce and put soldiers guarding it, and people began to starve to death. To this day, we don't have an exact figure in the early thirties of how many people starved to death in Ukraine because of decisions made by Joseph Stalin. When you look online, Madam Speaker, you get numbers from about 4 million on the low side to 15 million on the high side. I am no expert. I would guess it is more like 4 or 5 million. But 4 or 5 million people starving to death is something every American schoolchild ought to be talking about. And when there is a possible conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it is something that the history channels and that the news stations ought to be talking about a whole lot. Instead, when I walk around here and talk to staffers or talk to all the other people who help us around here, again and again, I find people who don't even know that 4 to 5 million Ukrainians starved to death in the early thirties. One of the interesting things about this is that efforts were made to hide this almost immediately. The Soviet Union itself banned discussion of all the people who starved to death in Ukraine. It kind of reminds me of certain people in the United States who don't like everything to appear online and like to take things down so things that are inconvenient for the people in charge are not publicized. One of the things that everybody should know about--and I once talked to a New York Times reporter who himself didn't know about it--is that a guy by the name of Walter Duranty who worked for The New York Times was given a Pulitzer Prize as he sat over there and knew very well that this starvation was going on but didn't report it. He probably didn't report it because the cool kids from the liberal media like to think wonderful things about the Soviet Union. In a private letter, he said that the suffering is inflicted with a noble purpose. So, that is what the readers of The New York Times were getting back in the early thirties, and that man was given a Pulitzer Prize. I might be wrong, but I don't think The New York Times has given it back. Isn't it amazing that an American newspaper would be so horrible that if one of their reporters knew that millions of people were starving-- there is a letter that he wrote at the time in which he guessed it could be as high as 10 million people were starving. But because the Soviet Union was the darling of the leftist intellectuals, apparently, he didn't like to report it for the people back home. And to this day, I believe, The New York Times has yet to apologize or get rid of their Pulitzer. In any event, as long as Ukraine is in the news, I would hope that American schoolteachers of social studies would begin to educate the American people about the 4 or 5 or 7 or 10 million people who starved to death in the early thirties. After all, unless you know about that, Madam Speaker, you don't know about the reason for the animosity--or at least one of the reasons for the animosity--between the Ukrainians and the Russians. You don't know why people should be concerned when a Senator from Connecticut goes off and attends an anniversary ceremony for the U.S. Communist Party and is just let off the hook. You don't know why people like me are a little bit concerned when the founders of Black Lives Matter were avowed Marxists. Unless you know about what happened in Ukraine and communism in general, Madam Speaker, you don't know why so many people fought and died in Korea and Vietnam. Of course, the Holodomor is only one of the things that every American schoolchild should know about. There were plenty of other mass massacres from the Soviet Union. There were a couple of massacres in Red China. We have the horrible taking away of freedoms in Cuba or Venezuela. We talk about the 1 to 2 million people who were murdered in Cambodia. These are things that every American schoolchild should know because, as I said, right now, we have people kind of in this building and kind of in academia in America who I don't think really have a problem with Marxism. They think it is kind of a cool thing to flirt with. I do hope that our news stations and our educational institutions at least now do a little to educate the American public on the millions of people who died in Ukraine. There are two other issues to deal with today. I will follow up a little bit on what my colleagues said before because that is arguably the one area which--there are many areas--but on which the Biden administration is permanently damaging America. We recently got the numbers of people who came in this country in December. It took a while to get them. The total, including what they call got-aways, is about 90,000 people who didn't go through appropriate channels, people whom we sometimes refer to as illegal immigrants, 90,000 in December. The December before, it was a little over 20,000. So we have gone up from 20,000 to 90,000 in 1 year. I guess it is another thing that the press isn't really talking about like it should. I guess the COVID and the inability to get monoclonal antibodies out to people, which isn't talked about enough either, but that is something else we talk about. We can talk about Ukraine, and meanwhile, we aren't paying attention to just 1 more month in which the number of people coming here has shot up from 20,000 to 90,000. As my colleagues just pointed out, not only is that people coming across, when you have an open border, we recently hit an all-time record of 100,000 Americans dying of illegal drug overdoses in 1 year-- 100,000. When I got this job, it was 45,000, and it was a scandal. Everybody in this House was supposed to have a plan to deal with the 45,000 people who died every year of illegal drug overdoses. Well, Madam Speaker, in 7 years, it has gone up to 100,000. The biggest problem is fentanyl, and 100 percent of the fentanyl, I am told, is coming over the southern border. But for some reason, our comatose press corps is not asking politicians, including the President, do you care? I mentioned the Vietnam war and the Korean war a second ago. When we talk about 100,000 people dying in 1 year, that is about as many American troops who died in Korea and Vietnam together. Every year people are dying, and all the heartbreak that that causes, we don't care anymore. Or at least our press corps or the people who determine what is on people's minds aren't caring anymore. If it was one of your loved ones who died you would care. So, I beg the American public and the comatose press corps to publicize the fact that we are now having 4\1/2\ times as many people a month come here as when Joe Biden took office and publicize the fact that 100,000 Americans are dying every year of illegal drug overdoses, largely fentanyl, which is frequently given to people who don't even know they have it. Now, we are going to address one final issue that has not received enough attention with regard to the Build Back Better bill. I will beg the Chair and anybody else who is listening to pay attention to this. The Build Back Better was a bill--one of these thousands, or at least well over 1,000-page bills--and to be honest, whenever you pass one of these massive bills up here, people who vote for it don't know all that is in it. It is impossible to know all that is in it. And I have talked to people about this provision that is in it and, quite frankly, most people don't know what is in it, to a certain extent, because there are sexier issues. But in Joe Biden's bill, we are giving grants designed, if they are accepted, to phase out 14(c) certificates. The listeners out there may or may not be familiar with work centers, or what used to be called sheltered workshops or CRPs, which are places--they do a lot of packaging in my district--places where people who have different abilities, sometimes are paid under minimum wage to do light manufacturing or packaging. It always is enjoyable for me to tour these facilities because you deal with people who, I would think, have been dealt a tough lot in life, and they are so overwhelmingly happy to have a job like everybody else; to have a job like their siblings where they go to work. And maybe, because of their different talents they are making $5 or $6 an hour. But they are getting other governmental assistance, and they are very proud every day to go to work and get a paycheck where they can buy some clothes for themselves, where they can buy gifts for their relatives. It is all so wonderful, and now they are under attack. There are two philosophical reasons, to give the other side its due, for shutting down the work centers and saying these people shouldn't be able to work there anymore. Some people feel that nobody should be able to work for minimum wage, and if you don't like the minimum wage of $7.50, you sure don't want people--or you claim you don't want people--working for $4 or $5 an hour. But again, these folks are getting other governmental benefits. It is not all they are living on. What you do when you get rid of 14(c) certificates, which is what you need to work for under minimum wage, you are telling these folks that you won't work at all. Secondly, there are people who don't like the fact that they feel these people are working in a segregated setting; in other words, they are working with other people with similar abilities to themselves. It is my experience, having toured or taken dozens of tours in places like this, that--and you can ask them as well--they are very happy to be working in these facilities. There are many people working in these facilities who have abilities similar to people in other facilities. And the people who work in these facilities, I think, like them so much because it is a chance to find lifelong friends. There was a time when people with different abilities had to stay at home and watch TV and just get to know their family members. But these jobs allow people to have--because frequently the turnover is not that great--they make friends who they will have for 30 or 40 years. It breaks my heart that there are people who think that we are going to shut these down because people will be so much better if they work in a facility without anybody with different abilities, and it will be so much better. We must be taking advantage of these people if somebody is making $5 an hour. I mean, I deal with the people who work in these facilities, including management. I don't think anybody is getting rich. They are probably, most of them, making a lot less money than a Congressman. But instead, they have to put up with these radicals--I will call them-- telling them that they are taking advantage of people because they are being paid 4 bucks an hour, 5 bucks an hour. So, in any event, I am going to ask people who care about people with different abilities; whether you have a relative in this position; whether you have a child in this position; whether you, yourself work in a work center, please contact your Congressman and say, don't shut down these facilities. It is what the life of so many of these folks is built around, and it would be crushing if you would try to just send them home or maybe find a business that will take them in for 3 or 4 hours a week, instead of 34 hours a week. It would be crushing for these people if they lost the ability to work at the work centers or the CRPs. So I beg the majority party, you are in charge, that if you do get something through on that Build Back Better bill, that this provision which is the end of the work centers is not in it. Now, I would like to thank you for staying late and listening to my additional analysis. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Okay. I don't know why the public tolerates President Biden's energy policy. Okay. I think the policy is predicated on the idea that we have some new or booming pollution problem in this country, and that is just not true. I particularly ask young people to pull up pictures of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Los Angeles, California, 50 years ago, and you will see how much better things are than they were a relatively short period of time ago. The overall air pollution in this country in the last 40 years has fallen 73 percent. Meanwhile, in the last 10 years, carbon dioxide, which everybody likes to talk about, has fallen 7 percent. At the same time, CO2 emissions in China went up 38 percent and, in India, they went up 56 percent. Right now, what is going on is our European allies make it that much more expensive to produce any energy. Steel plants are flooding to India and China, and China isn't backing off. They are making 43 new coal-fired power plants, as we speak. So what is the net result of chasing energy-related jobs out of this country and out of western Europe? It means the metal-producing foundries are headed to other countries with their jobs. And as the U.S. and Europe becomes economically weaker, those jobs go to higher polluting countries like India and China. And the clean countries with the clean air and clean water, like the United States, get penalized. So it is time to treat U.S. as number one again; for President Biden to change his energy policies; and get some more of that good air pollution-free or almost free plants in the United States, and not have the manufacturing done in the polluting countries of India and China.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to encourage the body to pass the Senior Independence Act. When I was back home over the last week, as I toured my businesses, wherever I went--be it in agriculture, tourism, transportation, manufacturing, or retail--businesses all had the same problem. They couldn't find enough people to work. They suggested I look at a change in Social Security law. Social Security is great, but currently under Social Security law-- and kind of a mistake that Franklin Roosevelt made in the original way it was proposed--as soon as you make $19,500, you wind up losing a dollar for every additional $2 you earn. This is causing people who would like to work more to stop working because the tax rate is just too high. It is time to pass the Senior Independence Act and move toward the point where you can make up to $30,000 before they take away your money, allowing more independence for our seniors and more labor for our businesses.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I have always felt the 1960s was where America went off the rails. Of course, Roe v. Wade wasn't decided in exactly the 1960s, but the 1960s really, I think, began with the assassination of President Kennedy. You would say the end of that disastrous decade was January 22, 1973, where the Supreme Court decided that abortion was legal in the United States of America. Just a disaster. Since then, 63 million unborn children have died in every State. Ten years before that, abortion would have been considered illegal. All churches would have been appalled by it, and all Americans knew it was just a horrible thing. But then, in an example of out-of-control judiciary, probably the most extreme example in our country, the U.S. Supreme Court came in and began a reign in which 63 million unborn children have lost their lives. The U.S. is one of seven countries where late-term abortions are illegal. We stand with Vietnam, North Korea, Red China, together with Singapore, Canada, and the Netherlands. We are one of the few countries in the world, after all God has given us, that we decide to step up and say it is appropriate to kill a child right up to birth. In any event, today, we mourn the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. We look forward to leaving this Chamber and marching in the March for Life, as we hope that this is finally--given that there is an important Supreme Court decision coming down--finally the end, or the beginning of the end, of this ongoing slaughter of the innocent in the United States.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I listened last night to President Biden's press conference, and I was disappointed that he felt the Republicans did not want to work with him. I would like to open the door, first of all, to working together to balance the budget. We don't consider it a goal of ours to race to get to $30 trillion in debt. Please, Mr. Biden, convene a group of Republicans and Democrats. Let's work together to balance the budget. Secondly, prior to you taking office, it was routine that about 20,000 people per month came across the border. Now, we are at over 80,000. I secondly ask that we convene a bipartisan group to get back down to 20,000 a month to cross the border. Finally, at the time President Trump was President, he was given a cocktail which cured his COVID illness almost immediately. That cocktail should be available to all Americans. I, again, encourage a joint conference with us to get together and cure the people who get COVID. Finally, Mr. President, stop being so divisive and screaming racism right and left. It does no good for this body to constantly call racism.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to address another, perhaps inadvertent, perhaps not so inadvertent, group of provisions in the Build Back Better bill. As we look across the country, when one compares to where America is today compared to where America was 50 years ago, certainly one area that I think most Americans would think is a step in the wrong direction is the breakdown of the traditional family. However, not all people consider the breakdown in the so-called western prescribed nuclear family structure as a bad thing. Black Lives Matter, which played such a big role in the elections last November, on their website came out saying we want to disrupt the western prescribed nuclear family structure. They are not the only ones who don't like the western family. We know Karl Marx felt that as he wanted to work his way towards paradise, we had to get rid of the traditional family. I don't know whether it is a coincidence or not, but our current welfare system with all of the programs that are part of it, be it the education grants, be it the medical grants, be it the food stamps, be it the low-income housing, are all set not to benefit families in which there are two parents at home to raise the children. In other words, the United States for years and years has been trying to get rid of the nuclear family. It is like Karl Marx himself were writing the welfare policies. In the Build Back Better bill, we are going further on down this line. I don't know that this is exactly supposed to be a pay back to Black Lives Matter, but the reconciliation bill will more than double the earned income tax credit marriage penalty. It has provisions for greatly increasing the number of low-income housing units. And I feel that the way those units are doled out, again, very difficult to get those units if you have a mom and dad at home. But there are people who want to get rid of that sort of family. I would strongly encourage the majority party, before they push this bill any further, to have a study done on who benefits from these new provisions and who doesn't, and is it one more time a situation which we are bribing people not to have old-fashioned nuclear families. I am afraid, like I said, right now, this looks like another victory for the hard leftwing of the Democratic Party that embraces the idea that we ought to get rid of the nuclear family. It is not a coincidence. It is in the bill. In any event, these are things I will leave our audience with as we break for the following week. If you know somebody who works in a sheltered workshop or work center, or know a Congressman, invite them to the sheltered workshops to see what they are in danger of shutting down. If you know people who do not yet have COVID, remind them to get more vitamin D. If there are any doctors out there--I know sometimes you can't be reimbursed for everything, but you guys make enough money-- make sure you begin to do some testing of vitamin D levels so that if people are below 30 nanograms per milliliter, they know it and they know that they should go to the drugstore and begin to get more vitamin D, together with zinc and vitamin C. Finally, I encourage the majority party, before they do any more with Build Back Better, to have some work done and see whether you really want to go ahead and further steepen the penalty for married couples who have children, which already, like I said, is like the policy of the United States: We don't want to have old-fashioned nuclear families. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, there are several issues of importance that I don't feel this body has spent enough time discussing, and unless they are addressed could result in a great deal of discomfort for a lot of Americans. The first is the issue concerning sheltered workshops, also known as work centers or community rehabilitation programs. Perhaps you folks are familiar with them. They are places where people of different abilities frequently work, frequently doing packaging, maybe light manufacturing. Because of the different abilities that some people have, they have to get what are called 14(c) certificates and may work for less than minimum wage. Disabilities they may have would include things like perhaps spina bifida or similar things that make it a little bit more difficult for them to work. Nevertheless, throughout my political career I have always enjoyed touring the sheltered workshops in part because the employees that work there are so proud of the work they are doing and so proud of the fact that they are able to earn a paycheck and purchase some of their own clothes, perhaps purchase gifts for their relatives. Right now these sheltered workshops are under attack in the Build Back Better bill, and that bill may easily pass some time in the next year. I am afraid even the majority of Democrats who voted for the bill are unaware that these sheltered workshops are under attack. There are two reasons why people want to get rid of sheltered workshops. There are people who feel under no circumstances should somebody make less than minimum wage. This is ignoring the economic reality and ignoring the reality of the type of jobs that are available for these folks. The second concern they have is they feel that these people are segregated from the rest of society working in a sheltered workshop. That is, of course, not true. There are people of all sorts of abilities in these workshops; and in my opinion, people who work in these workshops frequently work there for 25 or 30 years. And people in management also work there for an extended period of time. Nevertheless, there is an extreme group which feels that we are taking advantage of people by having them work in the workshop. I will point out that in addition to the ability to have some of your own economic independence, you develop lifelong friends in these workshops that you wouldn't develop if you were looking for other jobs out in the community. One of the concerns for people with different abilities is that it is important that they develop friendships other than just their parents or immediate family. It is something that is always of great concern for parents of people in situations like this, and insofar as the sheltered workshops were shut down, you wouldn't have this natural grouping of friends or lifelong coworkers that you are going to be able to interact with. It is time for the sheltered workshop community to wake up and realize in this bill of thousands of pages the radical group that wants to shut down the sheltered workshops may finally get their dream. And if they get their dream, they will find that some of these folks are going to find jobs in the community, but they are not going to find 35 or 40 hour a week jobs in the community. They may find 3 or 4 hour a week jobs in the community. They will lose the pride that comes with having a full-time job. They will no longer feel they are like their siblings or friends who go to work every day and earn a paycheck. It will be devastating for these folks. Some folks have been working in these sheltered workshops for 25 or 30 years and have years left to go. It is tragic that some people want to take this freedom away from them. I should also point out that nobody forces anybody to work in these sheltered workshops. If there were other jobs in the community they or their guardians could take them out and have them work fast food or have them work light retail or have them work in some light manufacturing. But what these people who are trying to get rid of these sheltered workshops are doing is they are taking away the choice that these folks have made for themselves, the choice that makes them feel so happy, makes them feel so good. So I strongly encourage people who know someone in these workshops to get politically involved before these folks' lives are devastated. And insofar as we have any of the Democrats paying attention to what I am saying right now, I beg you to go in your district and tour one of the sheltered workshops yourself because they will make you feel so good. There are very few things in this job that make me feel as good as touring these workshops because you see how happy and productive people can be that on the face of it seem to be dealt a tough hand in life. But they have made what they can of themselves. They are very happy. And I beg the majority party not to take away this right. The second issue that I would like to talk about a little bit today is with regard to COVID. One of the frustrating things about the establishment--and I think this goes back even before the Biden administration--is there has not been enough discussion of the correlation of inadequate amounts of Vitamin D and getting severe cases of COVID. Right now in this country, all Americans should be aiming at having 30 nanograms per milliliter of Vitamin D. People who fail to get that 30 nanograms disproportionately wind up getting COVID and getting COVID severely. There are other things that make you more likely to get COVID. If you have diabetes, if you are overweight, these are other things that correlate with getting COVID. And we know that if you lose a little weight, your situation would improve. Vitamin D or a lack of having 30 nanograms per milliliter of Vitamin D does correlate with problems. Right now in our society, sadly, 96 percent of Black Americans are insufficient to that level, 88 percent of Hispanics, 65 percent of Whites. It is not something that has been talked about anywhere near enough, and it is a question as to why the public health establishment has not done a better job of explaining the correlation between bad Vitamin D outcomes and bad COVID outcomes. Some people feel it is not something that is talked about enough because there is no money to be made. And, of course, a lot of people are making a lot of money on COVID; but if you solve your Vitamin D levels by just going to the local drugstore and buying 20 or $40 worth of Vitamin D pills, there is not the possibility of people to make billions of dollars. Nevertheless, if you are out there, I strongly encourage all Americans to get a hold of Vitamin D. Vitamin C and zinc are good, as well, but today I try one more time to beg my friends back home to go get some Vitamin D, and I beg the medical community who right now does not test for Vitamin D like they should; I am told it is because there is not enough reimbursement in Medicare, and we don't want to lose money on what we are doing, but the medical community ought to be testing everybody for Vitamin D if they come in for their annual checkup. All Americans should be looking to get that level above 30 nanograms per milliliter. There are other things, as well, that could be done to reduce the high number of deaths from COVID. Fenofibrate is a drug which some Israeli researchers had success with. It is a generic drug, and as a result, it is very reasonable to get a hold of. The same thing is true with hydroxychloroquine. And there are doctors I know who have had success with that. I don't think it is quite as successful with the omicron variant, but it was very successful with the alpha variant. And there is ivermectin, and I have known doctors who have used that, and they have had success curing people there. But for whatever reason, on some of these cheaper alternatives that I think could have saved hundreds of thousands of people, the public health establishment and the medical establishment has not been as outspoken as they should. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cline.)

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, so many areas to pick from in which we talk about the first year of this administration. No country can exist if you don't have immigration laws, and I can't think of anywhere where the new administration is more of a change from the old. We have gone through a situation in which about 25,000 people every year crossed our southern border, and now routinely over 75,000, tripling the amount of people who have come across our border. That has received a lot of attention, but not enough attention has been received for the lack of people being pushed back across the border if they are caught here breaking crimes or otherwise. In the first 6 months of 2020, about 93,000 people were kicked out. This time around, it is about 18,000. So we have about another 70,000 people who we don't want in this country, primarily because they have broken the law. Under the Biden administration, we don't kick them out. We have to also look at the carrot that they are giving people to come here in the Build Back Better bill, trying to give free college education to people who come here illegally. Every Democrat but one in this body voted for it, saying: Yes, absolutely. We not only want people to come here illegally, but we will give them free college education, free medical care. Unbelievable. Showing that the number one priority is to get people here illegally, they are not even giving tests for COVID, which says something or other. I mean, on the one hand, it is important that everybody even get a shot if they are hanging around Washington, D.C., but if you are coming across the southern border, we don't care. Unbelievable. Quite a change in America compared to what it used to be, and it is going to take a lot of work when we get a new President to undo the huge amount of damage that has been done to the fabric of this country in the first 12 months of Joe Biden.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a child, I was always so proud of Milwaukee. You would look at the crime records or the crime numbers in the biggest cities around the country, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, along with San Diego, year after year had the lowest murder rate in the country. It is, therefore, very disappointing to find out that at the end of last year Milwaukee, one more time, set their all-time record for murders, at 197. This is caused, I think, in no small part by politicians who scream racism and cause disrespect for the Milwaukee Police Department, and, therefore, the Milwaukee Police Department has to back off and not be aggressive, as Milwaukee continues to become more and more dangerous. I can only hope in the future that politicians looking to make cheap points do not further denigrate the Milwaukee police and do not further cause Milwaukee to hit another record this year in total murders.