Glenn Grothman

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, there are several things that we ought to be commenting on here. Earlier this week, the House passed the Senate companion to my legislation, the Congressional Budget Office Data Access Act. This important piece of legislation will improve the ability of the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, to carry out its responsibilities to the legislative branch and, by extension, to the American people. Under current law, the Budget Act authorized the CBO to collect information and data directly from Federal agencies. This data is critical as it allows the CBO to perform accurate and timely analysis and propose legislation, including calculating the cost of bills and assessing their long-term fiscal impact on our Federal budget. CBO's role in providing this budgetary and economic analysis is fundamental to informed decisionmaking in Congress, particularly as we tackle the challenges of fiscal discipline and responsible spending that the Congressman spoke about from this dais about one-half hour ago. However, despite the statutory authorization for CBO to access agency data, we have seen far too many instances were Federal agencies delay or restrict the CBO's access to the information necessary to perform its duties. Such delays and limitations can significantly hamper the CBO's ability to produce accurate cost estimates or deliver reports in a timely manner. This results in inefficient legislative processes and, ultimately worse, undermines our ability to make well-informed decisions for the American public. One of the primary reasons that agencies limit or delay provision of data to the CBO is the Privacy Act, which governs how agencies manage and share personal data. Currently the Privacy Act represents a significant obstacle for the CBO, even though it is already authorized to handle the same data under stringent confidentiality requirements. The CBO Data Access Act addresses the problem by granting the CBO the same Privacy Act exemptions already extended to other legislative branch entities such as the Government Accountability Office and Congress itself. Let me emphasize: this bill does not diminish the protections in place for sensitive information. CBO will remain subject to the same rigorous confidentiality standards as the agencies providing the data. By extending this exemption, we are simply ensuring that the CBO's authority is brought in line with that of other legislative branch entries and that it has the data access it needs to continue providing high-quality, independent, nonpartisan analysis to Congress. Furthermore, the need for the CBO to have timely access to data is especially pressing in today's legislative environment. Congress is tasked with evaluating the budgetary impact of increasingly complex policies, whether it be in healthcare, infrastructure, national defense, or tax reform. These areas require detailed analysis, and without access to accurate, comprehensive, and timely data from other Federal agencies, the CBO could not fulfill its role. Madam Speaker, I am proud to have introduced the House version of the CBO Data Access Act along with my colleague, Representative Mfume. I would also like to thank Senators Peters and Collins for their work on this legislation. This bicameral and bipartisan effort demonstrates the shared recognition across party lines of the importance of ensuring the CBO has the tools it needs to provide Congress with the best data available. The Southern Border

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to discuss a few of the issues that the press should be covering in the next 6 weeks leading up to the election but probably will not. The first one, one more time, is the border. We are waiting right now for the results to come in from the number of people who have crossed the border in August. However, we already know, despite what we hear from other people, that we have an all-time record number of people crossing into the southwest border in the first 11 months of the year compared to any year previously. That is 2.7 million people in 11 months. This is a dramatic increase not only over past years but over prior administrations. Before COVID, it was not unusual under the Trump administration to have 11,000 people cross the border, that is the difference between 11,000 and what worked its way up to 350,000. We had 243,000 this February, and even after the Biden administration weighed in and are bragging about something they finally did as we headed into the election, we were still at 154,000 in August, way more than what we saw, say, in a month in 2020 before COVID of 11,000. So we are already in the 15-times increase. The cost of this is, of course, monetarily high, although that is not the major concern, but whether it is paying for schools, paying for medical treatment, or paying for housing for people who right now do not have a job to pay for themselves is huge. At a time when the budget is so wildly out of whack and we are going so wildly, deeply into debt, the idea of having such a huge cost put upon us is intolerable. Not only that, this open-borders policy which continues is resulting in the loss of life of about 100,000 people every year from fentanyl. That is before we get into the number of people who died crossing the border, be it drowning in the Rio Grande, drowning in the Pacific Ocean, or dehydrating in the Arizona desert, and before we talk about the huge number of sexual assaults that are taking place on women who try to cross the southern border because the southern border today is controlled by the brutal Mexican drug cartels. We had a hearing on this topic earlier today, and some members of the Democratic Party, and sometimes they confuse the public on this, wonder what other way, why don't we solve the problem and find a way to let these people come in the country? What they are not telling you, Madam Speaker, is every year in this country, 850,000 people approximately are sworn in as new American citizens, 850,000. Historically, if you break it down into 3-year increments, and it goes up and down by year, but if you break it down into 3-year increments, that is right now at the all-time high. Nobody should get confused and think there is no way to come into this country legally or no way to become a citizen legally. Every year 850,000 people find a way to come into this country legally. This dwarfs, by the way, the number of people who are coming here, say, in the 1950s or 1960s, when I was growing up. We are doing more than our share of allowing people to come into our country. I encourage the press to dig into these numbers, to publicize the new annual number that is going to be released sometime in September. I hope we also do a good job of publicizing the huge number of people who are dying because of drugs at the border. I think one way for the American people to understand it is that, every year in this country, about twice as many people die from illegal drugs as died in 12 years in Vietnam. If you are like me and can remember the Vietnam war, you remember all the protests, all the coverage in Newsweek and Time magazine about the huge number of Americans dying there, every year in this country, twice as many people die of illegal drug abuse as died in 12 years in Vietnam. By the way, when I talk about this, the number of people crossing the border, I should remind Americans that our enemies--and we always pass a large defense budget here and prepare for a military war--Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian President in the early 1960s and late 1950s, said that he was going to take over and conquer America. He still, I think, spoke for his successors as being a Socialist leader in the world at that time. I mention that because I think there are several ways in which we can lose our country that does not involve being attacked by the military, and one of those is at the border. Obviously new people are coming here who do not necessarily understand our Constitution, have bought into our culture. It is the reason why we are generous and let more people here, but we cannot let unlimited people here. That would be the end of the United States as we know it. The second way that I think our enemies are able to cause the United States to collapse is the crisis of the family. In the middle 1960s, there were--I believe it is the 1960s, I don't think the 1950s--about 5 percent of the births in the country were to a woman who did not have a husband at home. That slowly worked its way up to 40 percent after what, in my opinion, was the worst President in this country's history, Lyndon Johnson, started the Great Society in which he bribed women to have children out of wedlock and gave them things, some very costly, provided they didn't marry a man with a job. You can go through many programs. There are about 78 programs that are handed out with a significant marriage penalty. In other words, it is very difficult to get it if a woman is married to a guy with an income, easy to get if she does not have much of an income--be it low- income housing, be it SNAP, be it the earned-income tax credit, be it the WIC, be it the SSDI, be it the Medicaid program, be it the Pell grants, be it the daycare. You can easily get hypotheticals, and it varies from person to person, of up to $30,000 a year in bribes not to get married. This, of course, is the dream of the hard left. For whatever reason, Marxism holds a sway over a lot of people in academia. This is something the Marxists would want. The breakdown of the American family is something that the feminists have wanted, particularly in the 1960s. It is something that Angela Davis, who was a large Black militant, wanted. It is something that the Marxists who founded Black Lives Matter wanted. They wanted to break down what they refer to as the Western- prescribed nuclear family. Of course, we had nuclear families all over the world. That, by itself, is a very racist statement, but the thing the American people ought to remember about this is there have been people who wanted to destroy the family for the last 200-plus years. It actually goes back before Marx. It includes the people who participated in the horrid French Revolution. They all wanted a world free of God, free of commandments in the Bible, and they felt it would be a lot more fun to live life if they didn't have any marital obligations. It is not surprising, in the crowning achievement of the left in my lifetime, the Great Society, that that program was designed to clearly bribe people not to get married. It is not a surprise that, in his current budget, President Biden is putting more moneys in these programs. By putting more money in the program, he wants to increase the incentive not to be married. I am going to direct people to one author, which I think is why I came to realize that the Great Society and the current American welfare system was almost, by design, trying to destroy the family. There is an author by the name of George Gilder, a great guy who is still alive. George Gilder did studies as long back as the 1970s, and he followed people around in low-income areas, and what he found surprised him. When a young girl who wasn't married got pregnant, he had thought, like throughout most of history, that was cause of concern, that we better get married, that we have to scramble and get money to support her. Instead, what he found, in certain areas where there wasn't a lot of money in the first place, it was a sign for glee because the woman and her boyfriend went around from office to office getting the then-called food stamps, getting the low-income housing, getting the WIC, getting the predecessor of the Medicaid. All of a sudden, they had it made in the shade because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Hence, George Gilder pointed out, first of all, that this was bad for the child. He also pointed out something I wouldn't have thought about on my own. It was bad for the men because usually man's purpose in life is to take care of his family. If the government is going to weigh in and give all of these things to a woman and her child, it kind of takes away the purpose of a guy working, so they don't have a purpose in life. In any event, I think the overly generous Great Society programs have led to the breakdown in the family, and they are one more example of what Nikita Khrushchev talked about, that being that they will cause America to collapse from within as we pay people to raise children not in the traditional, nuclear family environment. There is a third way that I hope the press would begin to cover in which we are trying to chip away at America. It was actually touched upon briefly by the Democrats, of all people, though I don't think they realized what they were saying in a committee that I was at earlier this week. Beginning in 1965, also under Lyndon Johnson, they began to create racial preferences in this country, and sexual preferences. At the time, the so-called minority population was much smaller than it is now. Nevertheless, they began to categorize people by where their great-great-great-great-grandparents lived, and we had Black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Pacific Islander Americans and Native Americans and Asian Americans. Recently, we have added to the bunch under the Biden administration because we want everybody to think of themselves as a hyphenated group, the Middle Eastern and North African Americans. The Supreme Court has struck down college admissions, but they have turned every hiring decision in a company that does a decent amount of business with the Federal Government and every contracting decision into a decision not based on merit, but a decision based on race. This is one way to destroy America. America has done such a good job under its first 200 years of causing people to view themselves as individuals, as Americans. The hard left, doing all they can, is trying to get Americans to view themselves as a small subgroup, and not only view themselves as a subgroup, but to ask for something on behalf of that subgroup. I recently read a book about this topic, and the rationale for this is what I had feared it was all along, but this was laid out in the book. There was an important Communist sort of person, Socialist person by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who had a great deal of power over the radical--the radicals of the 1960s. Of course, at the time, in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was the goal of these radicals to destroy the United States. They had hoped to destroy the United States by breaking the United States into the wealthy versus the average guy. They thought the average guy would spring up, declare war on the wealthy, and we would sink the United States. That, of course, didn't happen. America is a deeply religious country, which I think is one reason why the hard left hasn't succeeded in taking over America. America is also not the type of country who is jealous because somebody has a mansion or something. They failed. This kind of made Herbert Marcuse unhappy, and it made his disciples in Europe and the United States unhappy. At the time, he laid out a plan to weaken the United States and take over the United States, and that is he was going to set one racial group against the other racial group. He felt that is how we could destroy America and eventually cause it to break down. That is exactly what is going on today. They have succeeded in persuading even ethnic groups here sometimes to take advantage of set- asides based on background. It is particularly unusual when you look at all the subgroups in this country that are actually doing much better than the Americans who were here all along, Indian Americans, Chinese American, Filipino Americans, Cuban Americans, all doing better than the Native-born Americans, but never the left because they want to divide America and destroy America, these people have been told that we have a horrible country and they need the government to help them, and we will see what we can do to help them. This is surely another way to try to destroy America, and the American public should know it is not just Glenn Grothman saying it. Herbert Marcuse, well-known Communist from the 1960s and 1970s, himself laid out this racial identification as a way to destroy America. I have some questions that perhaps the press should look into but don't. In so far as they don't tell the real reason for these preferences, which is to destroy America, they say we are giving these preferences to make up for past prejudice or for current prejudice in our country. Like I said, I don't think it makes a lot of sense because the immigrant groups or many immigrant groups are perceived or succeed largely beyond what the Native-born do. In any event, I think we ought to have a discussion. In order to get preferences, should you be born in America, or should you have to be born in America, or can you come here, say, straight from the Gaza Strip, come to the United States because of some family preference, and immediately be given preferences in government contracting or government hiring? Is there a requirement for an individual to be considered a member of a group? Should it be \1/2\, should it be \1/4\, should it be \1/8\? Right now, you self-identify, and how that works out as a practical matter is something that should be discussed. Should we distinguish an immigrant between people who just show up here or have been here over a period of years? I think it is odd, but one of the things that is true is, right now, if you are born in Spain, you are considered European and not eligible for preferences, but if your ancestors came from Spain and spent a few generations in Cuba, you are considered a person who is a victim of prejudice and gets preferences. In any event, this is another way that I think we are chipping away at America. There are two more ways that I think our enemies from within are trying to chip away at the United States and destroy it. One is their attack on law enforcement. President Biden was an expert at standing in this Chamber and implying that the police, law enforcement of this country, was racist. So many studies have been done showing that is not true, but if you are a hard left-winger and want to divide America, I suppose you could make up stories and say that. Because maybe one group is more in prison than another group, it must be because of racism. You should walk around with a chip on your shoulder, and you should blame your plight not on what you have done but on racism. I think it is important that the studies that are out there showing there is not a racist problem with police in this country should be disseminated, so that when it is implied to young people in college or young people in high school that they should disrespect the police because of all this prejudice, the young people have the ammunition to ignore what their teacher or college professor is telling them. The final thing that I think is going on that is weakening America is this transgender revolution. In August, like many Congressmen, I spent it in my district and rang some doorbells. There were two doorbells that were particularly disappointing to me and heartbreaking. In both cases, the door was answered by a grandma, and in both cases, the grandma--seems a strange thing to tell her Congressman--was upset because, in one case, a granddaughter and, in one case, a grandson had gone down the transgender route. Studies will show that the vast number of people here are going to back out of this lifestyle, but today, our government is doing what they can to try to normalize this lifestyle. I think some of these people are going to go down the path of being transgender their whole life, but some may go down 10 or 15 years. They may never have children of their own, and I really felt sorry for the grandparents whose, I think, children were victims of this transgender ideology. For one, it was her only grandchild, and of course, it is not surprising where it comes from. At least some of it comes from the fact that the current administration is threatening to withhold funds from local school districts unless they go all in and have to allow like transgender boys into the girls' bathroom and such. In other words, they are trying to normalize transgenderism. If you read a little bit about the history of feminism, this is what the extreme feminists want. They want no difference at all between men and women, and what would be a better way to get their utopia than have boys become girls and girls become boys. In any event, it is disappointing to see that the current administration is pushing people into this lifestyle, and at least from what I have seen from meetings I have held in this building, you are going to wind up with a lot of very unhappy people who didn't have to be that unhappy. In any event, these are five ways I think the hard left is trying to chip away at our great country, and I hope these are things that the press corps publicizes over the next couple of months as we head into this election. They should talk more about what is going on at the southern border, with record numbers of people flowing here. They should talk more about the continued push to provide material benefits that will cause less families to have both a mother and father at home. We should talk more about this attack on law enforcement and publicize studies showing that law enforcement is not racist. We should talk more about this revolution that would have been unheard of when I was a child, this transgender thing, which is causing people to adapt a lifestyle which is a very sad lifestyle. It will obviously, in many cases, result in people not having children. We should talk a little bit more about this artificial racial divide that the left seems so determined to push on the American public. Again, I mentioned all the subgroups. The Biden administration this year has added another group, Middle Eastern and North Africans, even though people from Iran are doing fantastically well in this country. There is no evidence of prejudice, but the Biden administration still wants to add more people to the heap because, in part, they want to give something to people to buy their votes, but in part, they want to create more division. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I don't know whether the people back home realize how rare it is for a Democrat to be calling upon a Republican to speak about a bill, but it is a testament to the size of our fiscal crisis and the fact that we have a lot of very good, bipartisan type legislators in this building. In any event, our national debt now stands at an astronomical $35 trillion. It is an unconscionably large debt, which is the result of decades of wasteful Washington spending, and it is a problem both parties have contributed to. To put it in historical perspective, as a share of our economy, the last time the debt was this high was at the end of World War II. Last year, the Federal Government spent more than $6 trillion and racked up a deficit of $1.7 trillion, the third highest annual deficit in our country's history. One of the most frightening aspects of our out-of-control spending is the accelerating interest costs, which, of course, we can't reduce. So far in 2024, we have spent $870 billion on interest costs. That is more than we spent on Medicare or the military. It is way more than we spend on the military. To illustrate how profligate the government is, let's take a look at how much of each year's spending was borrowed: 2018, 19 cents; 2019, 22 cents; 2020, 48 cents; 2021, 40 cents; 2022, 22 cents; and 2023, 28 cents. We expect this trend to continue for at least the next 5 years. One cause of the red ink in recent years has been the use and abuse of emergency spending. The debt ceiling deal that was passed earlier this year set caps on discretionary spending, although there is a loophole that allows certain spending to be designated as emergency spending, and that is not subject to the cap. While there are some items that are genuine emergencies, too often, Congress slaps the term ``emergency spending'' on projects it simply wants to fund despite the caps. Here are a few examples of Federal spending that were labeled as emergency spending: $6.6 million for the replacement of irrigation systems at two golf courses in Colorado Springs, $12 million for the renovation of a minor league ballpark in New York State, and $70 million for tourism marketing in Puerto Rico. These emergency designations add up. Last year, Congress designated $162 billion in emergency spending. This year, it is up to $196 billion. In fact, over the last 30 years, Congress has provided $12 trillion in emergency spending. I have been here for some of these, and I don't consider them emergencies. As soon as ``emergency'' is slapped on them, it means the money can be spent with reckless abandon. Clearly, if we are going to tackle our debt and deficit problem, Congress will have to break its addiction to emergency spending, the culture of rampant emergency spending abuses encouraged by the CBO's baseline budget. By law, the CBO is required to assume that any spending Congress designates as emergency spending will continue on throughout the entire 10-year budget window and grow with inflation. This is obviously reckless. Keep in mind, emergency spending is meant for one-time spending, not spending that goes on in perpetuity. You would never know that based on the way the CBO does these things. In fact, the most recent CBO baseline update demonstrates the need for this bill. In the June report, CBO raised the projected spending over the next 10 years by $945 billion. Nearly all of this projected increase is due to $95 billion in supplemental foreign aid spending Congress passed earlier this year. Does it make sense for CBO to assume this temporary spending will continue for all 10 years? It is ridiculous on its face. To address this challenge, I am pleased to work with the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case) to introduce the Stop the Baseline Bloat Act. This bill would amend the relevant law to ensure emergency spending is not included in CBO's baseline. Getting our fiscal house in order, we must start with a neutral baseline, and this bill will make a meaningful step toward fiscal sanity. Mr. Speaker, for this reason, I am pleased that this bill will be marked up by the House Budget Committee tomorrow morning. I hope this commonsense bill receives widespread bipartisan support. I thank the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case) for his leadership in putting this bipartisan Special Order together and for leading the Stop the Baseline Bloat Act.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I was a little bit stunned when I came down here today to hear the argument made on pollution. I would just request that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle do some research as to the amount of pollution that came from cars 50 years ago compared to today or just get pictures of Pittsburgh or Los Angeles 50 years ago compared to today. Things are already so wildly cleaner. In any event, my major concern about this rule is it is another attack on the middle class. I have been told that a Chevy Silverado may cost $20,000 more, EV or not. I mean, people cannot afford that. It is understated, but because of the huge cost to repair and the cost of insurance, and most States, including Wisconsin, have mandatory insurance, it is dramatically more than a traditional car. It wasn't until this week I found out that the resale value was less. If you are like a lot of people and like to trade in your new car 5 or 6 years down the road, you are going to get less for your EV vehicle. When you combine the money you are going to lose on the depreciation, the huge increase in insurance, and the huge increased cost when you buy the car, it is just an assault on the middle class.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, there are a variety of issues that I think ought to be talked about, at least once, before we leave for our districts this Friday. They are topics I don't think the press is paying enough attention to, so one more time, I beg them to pay attention to these topics. The first one is the border. Our fiscal year wraps up on September 30. Right now, we have 11 of the 12 months in the books for fiscal year 2024. Now, something that I think has been underreported, we have one more time hit the all-time high of the number of people coming into this country who are--other than traditional means, I will say--coming across the southern border, in August, with 154,000 people. We have now hit 2,700,000 people for the year as a whole. This is by comparison with Donald Trump in his last entire year, which was a little under 100,000. Part of that year was COVID, but nevertheless, even the next year after that was well under the million total. It is a difficult number to get an exact count on. It includes people who have been released at the border. It includes what they call got- aways, which are a more dangerous class of people. It includes people who have entered the country on what we call the CBP One app, which is something I don't think President Biden had the ability or constitutional authority to do. It includes other people who he has allowed across under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan program. Nevertheless, 11 months in with 1 month to go, we are at 2,700,000 people entering the country, breaking the previous record in the third year of the Biden administration, giving us a total of what appears to be 20 times as many people entering the country than President Trump's last year. I think it would be useful at this time to deal with the argument that we have to allow some people here. Another number that I don't think is talked about enough, if you look in 3-year increments, we recently hit the all-time high--and we monitor when the new numbers come out--the all-time high of the number of people who were sworn in as legal citizens in the United States. In the last 3 years, we have had an average of just under 900,000 people sworn in as legal citizens. By comparison, in both the Clinton and Bush years, we were around 700,000. In the 1960s, when I grew up, we were only a little over 100,000. The reason I point that out is, people who think we should ignore the laws kind of imply that it is very difficult to come here and that we are desperately in need of more people from other countries. Again, I repeat, in the last 3 years, we have had an average of just under 900,000 people sworn in, something that is the all-time record. We now should combine that with the 2,700,000 people, who--it is not exactly the same thing--have come across our southern border or are allowed in under these special programs by President Biden. It is important to remember the human cost of all these programs. In addition to changing the United States and having a lot of people who aren't used to abiding by and necessarily revering or understanding our Constitution, the growing number of people coming across the southern border is where our fentanyl crisis comes in. I have to repeat, from illegal drugs, twice as many people are dying every year as died in 12 years of the Vietnam war. Mr. Speaker, 110,000 people are dying from fentanyl, which I think is, in part, a function of the current administration and the Vice President when she was in charge of the southern border and allowing everything to come across. I also want to point out that the last time I was at the border, I talked to a woman who was kind of in charge of talking to the women who were coming across the border, and she spoke in hushed tones over all of them that are being sexually assaulted. I know President Trump tried to bring this to the fore, and of course, he was attacked for being racist, for pointing out that there were a lot of sexual assaults done on the southern border. Another problem we have here is we are making the drug gangs, which are doing so much to control Mexico, wealthy. Every time I have been at the border, Border Patrol is under the impression that these brutal drug gangs that are responsible for so many murders in Mexico are making more money bringing people across the border than they are from selling drugs. I also point out as part of the over 2 million people who come here every month, 8,000 are unaccompanied minors. Of all the ridiculous ways the Biden administration is ignoring our southern border, the idea that we are letting 8,000 or 9,000 children come across the border without their parents is maybe the most outlandish thing you can think of. In this country, if a 10-year-old child is moving about the country, and we didn't know who their parents were, we would consider it a scandal, but that is what is routinely done at the southern border. Sometime in the next month, numbers will be released for the amount of people coming across the southern border in September. We already have the all-time record. I hope the press gives banner coverage to the new total of people coming into this country when the numbers are out for September, and we have the final fiscal year taken care of. Now, the next issue I don't think we have talked about. People do talk about inflation, and inflation is a big problem, and we know inflation is brought about when you spend money that you are not taking in. We know there were two big bills that were what we call supplemental bills, in addition to the regular bloated budget we pass around here. President Biden and the Democrats here passed something called the American Rescue Plan and an infrastructure bill. That infrastructure bill had some spending, which would have been done otherwise, but nevertheless, between the two, we were well over $2 trillion. What isn't talked about enough, and I wish the press would point it out more, is there was another program called the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, the spending there was about $1.2 trillion; it is sometimes forgotten that it was the goal. From what I can see of every Democrat around here, except for the Senators from Arizona and West Virginia who held it up, they wanted that program to be about three times the normal size of what it is. Frequently in this Chamber, even from Republicans, they blame this inflation on the 1.2--it is hard to believe around here that they still don't have an exact number, but the 1 to 1.2 trillion in the Inflation Reduction Act. Actually, virtually every Democrat wanted that number to be three times as high, $3.5 trillion. I think given that that was the mainstream thinking of the Democratic party at the time, the press ought to talk a little bit more about that proposed bill that would have passed out of this House if it weren't for two brave Democrat Senators, Kyrsten Sinema, and Senator Manchin from West Virginia, who held it up. Things could have been a lot worse if you didn't have two moderate Senators stand up to the ultraradical, mainstream Democrats that we now have in the House and the U.S. Senate. Let's see a little bit more discussion about the high level of spending that people really wanted at that time. The third issue, which I think should be one of the major issues of the campaign, but because we have a comatose press corps, they don't talk about it, is the war on marriage and the degree to which the U.S. Government today has passed program after program--largely exploding in the sixties, but since then, many of these programs have been expanded and no new programs added to them--in which a single parent gets government money as long as they are not living with the other parent. As a practical matter, these programs have caused countless children to be raised without a father in the home because that is apparently what the U.S. Government wants to do. Whether you look at the food-share program, the low-income housing program, the SSI for handicapped children program, the earned income tax credit, the daycare program, the Pell Grant Program, they all give significantly more money to a family if both parents are not around, and I say that if a working spouse is not around. Usually this means that if a man joins the mother and children and has a decent job, a $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year job, all of a sudden, the mother would lose all of these other programs. That is why we have gone from very, very tiny amounts of single parenthood in the sixties to over 40 percent in the nineties, and we are now on the march again. This has fundamentally changed life in America, it has fundamentally changed what it is like growing up in America, and it is something that is not questioned. Our conservative commentators should talk about it, and if they really cared about the future of society, our journalism professionals ought to be talking about it. People sometimes wonder why the mom and dad at home is now so rare, like it was a mystery as to why that happened or an inadvertent effect of the Great Society pushed by Lyndon Johnson, in my mind, until now, the worst President we have ever had. Let's not forget that Karl Marx, who still has a lot of influence in academia, said that we had to abolish the American family to have the communist heaven that he wants. Actually, this thinking went before Karl Marx. It was also the thinking in the French Revolution where people who wanted to get rid of the church felt that one of the things they should do is try to break up the family. During the sixties, this thinking was again out there. They weren't things that everybody read, but they were the type of things the intellectuals who sometimes decide the course of history have read. Feminist Kate Millett said that destroying the American family was necessary to bring about a leftwing cultural revolution. Later on, Angela Davis, another prominent radical at that time who was a communist, also came out against the American family and particularly the role of men in the family. More recently, Black Lives Matter called for ending the Western prescribed nuclear family structure. We all know that some of the major businesses and corporations in America gave money to Black Lives Matter even after that was put on their website. Two of the three co-founders of Black Lives Matter prided themselves on being Marxist and wanted to get rid of the American family. This did not stop Black Lives Matter from being a group that many politicians wanted to associate with, and they would show up with their signs at a rally. Just horrible. It is obvious to me that a goal of the new administration, whoever is sworn in this January, ought to look at whether it is time to change the rules, to change the formulas so that we no longer have an apparent policy in the United States of keeping both parents away from the children at the same time. Here is another quote, which I think is illuminating, and this quote comes from a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. A lot of people don't know people who are on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is nominally nonpartisan, but nevertheless, races for the Supreme Court clearly have one person backed more by the Democrat Party and one backed more by the Republican Party. Recently in a case, and this was just dicta, one of the liberal judges, Jill Karofsky, wrote a concurring opinion in which she said, ``The notion that marriage serves as the foundation of society is at best outdated, and at worst misogynistic.'' In other words, overtly anti-father. It is a scary quote because she kind of implies that marriage is already done. It is over with. The left has won. She can say that marriage is at worst misogynistic, anti-male. It is something I want the American people to think about. I want the people in Wisconsin to think about it. I want the journalists in Wisconsin to think about it. Is Justice Jill Karofsky right? Is it already the end of the American family, or can we fight and bring it back and make it the norm like it was 50 or 60 years ago? In any event, I think it is something that should be brought up and has not been brought up anywhere near enough. The third topic that I think we ought to discuss is the Biden administration's policy of giving preferences to one more ethnic group, something that nobody back home knows has happened. The reason they don't know it is happening is because it hasn't been covered in the press. The DEI effort, the idea of judging people by their ethnicity, judging people by their sex is something that has been around for over 50 years now, but the Biden administration, I think, keeps trying to push it more to the fore. It is something else that ought to be talked about in this campaign. The Biden administration last year changed the policy, as a practical matter, to create preferences for people who come here from the Middle East or North Africa. Now, we know there are already other groups that if they apply for a government job, they may be given preferences. If they own a company and want to receive a government contract, they will get preferences over Americans of European descent. By the way, you also get preferences for jobs if you work for a company that does over $10,000 of business with the Federal Government each year. In any event, we are now adding people from Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and Syria to this list. We are adding people who come here from Gaza to this list. Is that a good idea? Do we think when people are fleeing Gaza with all their wonderful anti-Semitic ideas and coming to this country that they should also be given preferences? Apparently, I believe that is what will happen now unless somebody does something and prevents that from happening. It is something most Americans don't know about. It is something that should be talked about. The next thing that should be talked about, and I brought five issues here. Obviously, we are giving them to the chair but also anybody in the press corps, and that is as we look to hire new people to run this government in January, are we committed to the First Amendment, which should be obvious. In August, it came out that Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, was apparently threatened in some way or cajoled into keeping things off something, which presumably was supposed to be kind of a wide-open medium that you could pursue and find out what was going on in America today. Instead, the people in the current administration decided to weigh in and say there are certain ideas that Americans apparently shouldn't be able to know about. At the time, a lot of it was concerning COVID, and, of course, different people had different opinions on social distancing, on the treatments that people received when they went to the hospital, on the vaccines, on all these things. Apparently, the past government didn't feel that Americans could handle all the information, so like maybe a government in the Soviet Union or China, there were some things that they felt had to be removed from people's computers, and that is why they weighed in with Mark Zuckerberg. We know before that, there were people who weighed in, the same political party, because they felt information regarding Hunter Biden was not something that the Americans could handle on their own, so we had to remove it and keep Americans in the dark. Maybe that was significant enough, it changed who won the last election, but in any event, it is another example of people of importance in America who kind of view the First Amendment with contempt. I would like to know, going in for the next election, where the people running for public office stand on the First Amendment. The final issue I would like to bring up which seems to be dropped is, in August when we were not in, like many other politicians, I rang doorbells in my district to see what was on people's minds. I ran across two grandmothers who had grandchildren who had tried to go down this transgender route. It was obviously very disturbing for both grandmothers. One of them only had one grandchild, and I could tell it broke her heart that her granddaughter, who she loved so much, had decided to go down the transgender path. This is obvious that we have far more of this than we had when I was a child. Most people who have what they call gender dysphoria will grow out of it. Unfortunately, we have a policy right now pushed by the Department of Education in which we have to, I would say, encourage or tell people that this is an acceptable way to behave. Right now, the Department of Education is threatening to withhold funds from school districts who don't, say, allow transgender guys into the girls' bathroom or such. In other words, this part of the culture is kind of, I believe, encouraging an increase in this sort of behavior. It is not something that affects many Americans, but if it affects Americans like the grandmothers I talked to, it is devastating. I would hope in the future that politicians who talk about this issue realize that when they, as President Biden is, talk about it like it is a very positive thing, the result is, I think you are going to have more and more people go down this path, and you are going to have more and more people who would have come out of it eventually stay in it. It is something else that should be talked about. Is the reason we have such a big increase in transgenderism because it was always there or is it because our culture is making it a more a permissible lifestyle and, as a result, encouraging children to go down this path? In any event, that is five issues that I wish the press would take up in October. I wish they would publish, as it comes out, the new all- time record for people coming across the southern border. I wish they would focus on not only the excessive spending that leads to the inflation but the even more excessive spending that virtually every Democrat in this Chamber was prepared to vote for about three times more than what became the Inflation Reduction Act. I hope that going into the election the press weighs in, should the United States continue the current policy of greatly increasing Federal benefits if you don't have both a working man and woman at home. In other words, the policy of encouraging single parenthood at the expense of having two parents at home. I hope the press focuses a little bit in the next election on are we going to have people who will stand with the First Amendment or are we going to have people who like to lean on our social platforms and say that there are certain things that Americans shouldn't know and are we going to see whether we are going to use America's schools to continue to encourage the transgender lifestyle. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 432.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I will comment on the horrific events of a week ago. For the second time in 3 months, President Donald Trump was the subject of an assassination attempt. The question is why and what can we do to prevent it from happening again. I have followed politics my whole life. I have never seen such language of hate coming from President Trump's opposition as I have heard from anybody else. Again and again, President Joe Biden has said: There is one existential threat. It is Donald Trump. President Biden has said: Trump and the MAGA Republicans, whatever that is, represent extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. They claim it is going to be the end of our democracy. I am not sure they know what democracy means. In any event, their clear intent is to tell the American people that Donald Trump will permanently change the type of Nation we have. This is absurd, and they ought to be called out for it by the mainstream press. They ought to be forced to--not forced, but begged to until they eventually do apologize to President Trump and say there is no evidence this is going to be the end of democracy, whatever that means, so we can avoid a third assassination attempt. I beg these people to please come to the floor here and apologize to President Trump.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Well, it has been about 6 weeks now since Congress last met, and I think it is time to review some of the major issues of the day that I do not feel the mainstream press is doing an adequate job of covering. We continue to have people stream across our southern border. The Biden administration has made some changes after 3\1/2\ years mildly reducing the amount. Nevertheless, in the most recent month available, we still have an estimated 145,000 people crossing the southern border per month. It is not difficult to go back to the prior administration and find monthly numbers 4 years ago of about 8,000 people a month. You can say that is due to COVID, but if you go back even before COVID, you would have monthly figures of about 11,000 people crossing the southern border, so we go from 11,000 to 145,000. That is despite the fact that we are pausing, waiting for another 30,000 a month to cross as they redo their parole program, so we will have an extra 30,000 from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. In addition to that, we have another 6,000 to 7,000 a month in another program coming across from Afghanistan. Why do we not talk more about this, the scope of the problem that we have--even after the reduction--10 or 12 times as many people crossing the southern border compared to the last administration? And that is just the numbers coming here. In addition to that, we have the human tragedy of people coming here, the people drowning in the Rio Grande which they don't report, the people drowning in the Pacific Ocean, which they don't report, the people dehydrating in the Arizona desert, which they don't report. The last time I was down there I asked one more time the woman who was in charge of vetting, or meeting the new people crossing the southern border, and she admitted a high number of women were being sexually assaulted as they came north, north through the lands that are controlled by the Mexican drug cartels. Where is the party that purports to be the party of women as these women are being sexually molested? These are issues that should be covered daily in the newspapers in this country, but the scope of the problem is not covered. There is no reason why this 140,000 a month, 150,000 a month should not be reduced down to 10 or 11,000 a month as it was 4 years ago. I would like to see a little bit more coverage about that in the newspapers. The next thing that should be talked about is while we were out, Mark Zuckerberg talked about the degree to which he was leaned on to restrict speech in his business. Freedom of speech is something a lot of us have taken for granted, although I am a little bit afraid that the average American is beginning to waver on their commitment to free speech. Nevertheless, it is something that should be brought up as we head toward the elections in November. Is it appropriate that Mark Zuckerberg's huge company, one of the wealthiest people in America, should be leaned on by the Federal Government to restrict the free flow of information? And, by the way, the more this happens, the more the American public begins to accept it, which is really scary. The share of U.S. adults that say the Federal Government should restrict false information--and, of course, who is going to determine what false information is?--has gone up from 40 percent to 55 percent. Over half of Americans think the Federal Government ought to weigh in on restricting false information. I think this is particularly a problem, sadly, with the Democratic Party. When I was a child, the Democratic Party prided itself on unfettered free speech, and they got into things like pornography and that sort of thing. Now, it becomes the Democratic Party who is more in favor of restricting speech compared to Republicans, 70 percent to 40 percent. Americans have to wonder: Do we want to turn this country into a country more similar to the Soviet Union or Maoist China in which the government decides what is truth and what is not truth? This is one of the things that makes America unique, one of the reasons why we are proud to be Americans, and now people are beginning to say that this is perhaps not a good idea at all. But now I will deal with the third issue that I think is incredibly important, maybe other than the southern border, the most important issue facing America today, and that is the breakdown of the family. There have always been people--people that say mom and apple pie is everybody's favorite, they are profamily and wish they could have a mom and a dad at home. In fact, there have always been powerful people in history beginning with the radical leftists in the mid-1800s who felt the family was restricting and felt that it is something that we should break away from, destroy. This is one of the things that began to come out of the French Revolution in the 1780s, and to this day, some people view the French Revolution as something that should be looked upon favorably. In 1848, Karl Marx--and many people read Karl Marx to this day-- believed there was a need to abolish the family. He put that in ``The Communist Manifesto.'' Mr. Speaker, 50 years later with the rise of the feminist movement, or 100 years later, radical feminist, Kate Millett, said that destroying the American family was necessary to bring about the cultural revolution that she wanted. Powerful feminists in the 1960s, a time of upheaval in America, a time when changes were made in America, the radical feminists wanted to weaken the American family. A lot of times people aren't that outspoken about it because I believe the majority of Americans believe strong families are good, but there is a small minority, a very powerful minority, who wants to break down the family. Angela Davis, a powerful radical, well respected by the hard left, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties came out against the traditional family. Later on, Black Lives Matter, which exploded on the scene about 5 years ago, called for an end of the western-prescribed nuclear-family structure. Think about all the businesses that gave money to Black Lives Matter. Think of all the prominent politicians--many of them in this room. Now, they may say, oh, I wasn't for that part of their program. Think about that, people wanted to get rid of the ``western- prescribed nuclear family.'' Black Lives Matter were all on board and presented it to be a positive thing. Now, to what degree has this institution, the American Government and the U.S. Congress played in weakening the American family? Beginning in the 1960s with the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson--who I think was the worst President we ever had certainly until now--began a program in which an ever-expanding number of entitlements were doled out almost conditioned upon not having two parents, usually not a father, in the household. George Gilder in the late seventies wrote a book ``Wealth and Poverty'' about this program. And what he pointed out is that certain segments of society felt it was great when somebody got pregnant out of wedlock because they would be eligible for all sorts of government benefits, be it food stamps, in particular; be it the low-income housing tax credits, which also benefited the very rich; be it the earned income tax credit, which is much easier to get if both parents are not living together; be it the TANF grants, which also seem to be disproportionately doled out to families in which they get the man out of the picture. If you add up all these programs--I am told there are over 70 programs which, in essence, penalize couples who decide to get married. It varies from person to person, obviously, how many different programs they take advantage of, but it certainly is not unusual to have people suffer a $20,000 penalty if a couple who have had a child get married rather than living apart. Perhaps in the first couple years of these programs people were not aware of the effect of them, but they have unquestionably, over the next 30 to 40 years, greatly reduced the number of children without a mother and father at home. There was some progress made during the Clinton administration when Newt Gingrich forced Bill Clinton reluctantly to pare back some of these programs, but the programs are taking off again. Again, in his proposed budget, President Biden, and presumably, certainly Kamala Harris, have tried to grow these programs which are kind of conditioned upon not having two working adults in the home. I hope the press talks about this marriage penalty and forces our candidates to take a side one way or the other as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. In any event, it has fundamentally changed the American family. I think in many ways it has made America a less livable place since these programs went into effect, since the Great Society went into effect, and the question is: Should Congress, when they return in January, consider the fact that we are spending so much money to try to destroy the nuclear family as the great feminists thought we should, as Karl Marx thought we should, as the French revolutionaries thought we should, or should we step back from these programs, try to tailor them a little bit more to not display the hate for the old-fashioned American, westernized, nuclear family? I would hope that we would get some commitments that we are going to look at these programs. One more thing I want to address here for the American public that I think we have not dealt with to the degree to which we should is a lot has been said about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. For whatever reason, as we write the history of the last 4 years in this building, we have focused on the Inflation Reduction Act but not on other acts that also passed during that time period that are responsible for the huge amount of inflation that Americans are dealing with--inflation that I think is weakening American families because in an old- fashioned, American family you would have a house with backyard for the children to play in. Now it has become increasingly difficult to afford a house, much less even afford food. So we have to remember there were actually three programs that were passed. Under normal circumstances every year in this institution we pass a regular appropriation bill or what people back home would refer to as a budget bill of about $1.7 trillion. That is really too much because we keep driving our country more and more into debt. But in addition to the regular $1.7 trillion program, there were three other bills that were passed: an American Rescue Plan of $1.8 trillion; an infrastructure bill--and a few irresponsible Republicans voted for that as well--of $1.2 trillion; and an Inflation Reduction Act of another $1.2 trillion. What is not reported on and should be reported on is as outlandish as these spending bills were, the Inflation Reduction Act was originally called the Build Back Better Act, and that asked for $3.5 trillion. If it weren't for the Democrat Senator from West Virginia paring that $3.5 trillion down to $1.2 trillion, it would have been literally $2 trillion more. I think our slumbering press corps ought to be asking the people in this building: Do you wish that that act which started out at $3.5 trillion and was reduced to $1.2 trillion, should we be adding another $2 trillion to that figure or not? Do you think it was a good or bad thing that Senator Manchin wound up weighing in and reducing that act to a still irresponsible $1.2 trillion? I think it is important for the American public to know there was not reticence among the Democrat Party in passing it. They wanted a significantly higher spending amount, and I can't imagine what the cost of a house or the cost of a dozen eggs or whatever would have been had they gotten that $3.5 trillion that they all seemed to want at that time. In any event, we have covered five issues that all candidates should be asked to respond to, issues that the press corps should be bringing forth so that they force Congress here to deal with these issues. I think when our forefathers wanted a free press, they anticipated the press doing a little bit of work on their own. So we hope when we return next week we read a little bit more on the difference in immigration laws for immigrants coming across our southern border between today and where we were at 4\1/2\ years ago. I wish we would have more discussion as to whether penalizing people over $20,000 per couple for getting married is good public policy. I think we should be asking people if they come back here next January: Are they going to want to add the other $2 trillion that Senator Manchin pulled out of the Inflation Reduction Act or Build Back Better Act? Is there concern that a growing number of Americans, including, by the way, the Biden administration, have apparently leaned on Mark Zuckerberg to restrict free speech? Additionally, are we going to see any more of this from those politicians who get re-elected and are returned here in January? Hopefully, over the weekend some of these members of the press corps can wake up and cover these issues. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

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

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 403 and YEA on Roll Call No. 404.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, let's address some problems that ought to be covered by our mainstream media, but I don't feel are adequately being covered. One more time, I would like to review what is going on at the border. So the American citizens know, our fiscal year ends on September 30. Sometime in the next 2 months as information keeps flowing out from the administration on the number of people crossing our southern border, we are going to hit the all-time high in the number of immigrants who are coming here, what I believe to be the all-time high. Right now, at the end of June, we have let in, in our current year, over 2.1 million immigrants. When the prior administration left, in his final year, we were probably around about 120,000. The American citizens ought to know, when we hit the all-time record, it was 20 times as many people who had crossed the southern border as who crossed the southern border in fiscal year 2020. Of course, in addition to the skyrocketing high number, you have the huge cost of immigrants. Immediately when they come in, they are given school at probably 12 or 13 or $15,000 a year. They are housed sometimes in hotels. They are fed. They are given free medical care or largely free medical care, as President Biden promised he would do when he ran for President 4 years ago. I hope that when these final figures are released--they might be released in the middle of September, they might be released in the middle of October--the American public is immediately given time to digest the numbers. This is also a humanitarian problem, in addition to a huge fiscal problem. It is a humanitarian problem in that along with this group, it appears as though we are going to approach--probably won't get there-- but approach 90,000 unaccompanied minors. Can you imagine a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old child, without either parent there, being let into the United States? They will try to find a foster parent, and maybe it will be a relative, maybe it won't be, although the Biden administration no longer does DNA tests to make sure if somebody claims to be an uncle or a parent that they really are. There was a time we were upset about tiny numbers of people when their parents broke the law and they were separated from their parents for a week, 10 days, or something. Here we have a situation in which we are going to have almost 90,000 unaccompanied minors separated from their parents for life. Talk about a humanitarian problem. I should also point out that when we have an open border, people die making the dangerous trip--I have been at the border eight or nine times--be it drowning in the Rio Grande, be it drowning in the Pacific Ocean, or be it dehydrating in the Arizona heat. Every year, people are dying because they think they can come to this country because President Biden has created the expectation that people can come in this country without concern. I also want to point out, and I hate to be too tough on President Biden here because, of course, soon after he took office, he named Kamala the border czar. I would have thought at the time she would be so grateful for the responsibility. President Biden had rescued her from political oblivion after her Presidential run in 2020 came to naught, but when she was given this responsibility and opportunity to shine--and even if she didn't want the responsibility, Joe Biden gave it to her. Our boss doesn't always assign us responsibilities we want to have, but it was interesting that for over 3 years, nothing at all was done with the responsibility. It looks like then Joe Biden had to step in and do a little bit of something. It is something that as we go through our lives and the full impact of letting over 2 million people in this country every year hits this country, we remember the tandem of President Biden, and even more, Vice President Harris, who he assigned to solve this problem, what they did and the permanent crisis that we have. I should also point out because sometimes when people talk about the border, they say, oh, people just have to get here, and we have always been a country of immigrants. People should remember that if you look in 4-year increments, as far as I can tell, we are now hitting all-time records of legal immigrants coming in this country. We have legal immigrants coming in at about 850,000 people a year. I don't think we talk about that as much as we should. We have 850,000 new citizens a year. The other thing while I am talking about the number of new citizens coming here, I would like to touch on where the people are coming from. I touch on it because there are people who like to tear down America, you know, Eurocentric, that sort of thing. I dug up where our new immigrants are coming from, and kind of from-- it may be surprising to the people who like to run down America and talk about being racist, that sort of thing. In the most recent year that I could find, 2022, immigrants from Mexico are coming to the U.S. and being naturalized the most, then India, then Philippines, then Cuba, Dominican, Vietnam, China, Jamaica, El Salvador, Colombia, Pakistan, Haiti, Iran, South Korea, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Brazil. Those are the top 17. Madam Speaker, do you notice anything about those 17 countries that are the leading countries in sending us immigrants? None of them have a primarily European population. You have to get down to Britain where you come in at 18. The 17 countries that our new citizens are coming from the most are from all around the globe. None of them are from a primarily European country. I think that is something that we should tell our children and should be taught in class to counteract the people who like to run down America and scream racism, racism. In any event, to summarize, I hope that when we hit the all-time record of people coming across the southern border, which is going to happen sometime in September or October, it is the banner headline in this country as well it should be. The next issue that still has not been taken up but ought to be taken up is the large number of people in this country who are born into families in which they won't have a dad at home. Sometimes that is inevitable. However, it has changed America from a time when the Great Society kicked in until today. There are over 70 programs in this country in which it is much easier to get government benefits if one is a parent not married to the other parent. This is because we give out various things, food, medical care, and housing, if someone is perceived to be ``in poverty.'' If they are married to somebody with an income, then they are not in poverty. There are over 70 programs that you are eligible for that if you are married and the other parent has an income, then you would lose that program. You have a very generous earned income tax credit program that can get you $7,000 or $8,000; you have the food share program; you have, as I mentioned, the healthcare that you could lose if you married somebody with a decent income; and you have the rental assistance which can give you a benefit of over $10,000 a year. I don't know why politicians don't talk about it. I think it ought to be a subject for debate. There have always been people in this country who do not want children to be raised in what we call the old-fashioned nuclear family going back to Karl Marx and his disciples in the 1960s. His disciples are part of Black Lives Matter. It is not as if this decline in both parents at home happened in a vacuum. It happened I think because of government policies and the fact that there is a small but powerful group of Americans who wanted it to happen. We should have an open discussion on these programs. It hasn't been done I think because the press does not adequately describe for the public the generosity that will be given somebody if they stack these programs on top of one another. Obviously, nobody takes advantage of all 70 programs, but there are a whole lot of people who take advantage of six or seven of these programs and put themselves in a position in which financially they do not want to live in a two-parent household. In any event, these are a couple of the issues that I think have not been adequately covered in the newspapers. I hope they are in the future. To summarize, again, I would like to see a banner headline when sometime in September or October we have numbers released when we hit the all-time high number of what we will call illegal immigrants coming in this country. I would like to see the newspapers do a better job of covering the fact that our current, what else to call them, welfare programs appear designed to discourage Americans from having children raised by a married couple. I would like to have a little more information because when I ask people at random back home, they don't know the answer to these questions. I would like to have a little bit more publicity as to where the immigrants who are naturalized in this country are coming from because I think it would perhaps be a surprise to those people who like to educate our young people what a racist country we have when, in fact, the top 17 countries in which we get immigrants from are non- European countries. I hope the press follows up on these what I think are vital issues. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I want to address some issues that I have addressed from this podium in the past, but I think the American press corps has still not picked up on them. They are issues that ought to be debated in the upcoming elections because I think over time, they have a profound effect on America. When I talk to people my age and up, they are almost uniformly concerned about where America is going, and they feel America is not particularly as great a country to raise children in as the America that they grew up in in the seventies or sixties or fifties. When I ask them why, they sometimes have a hard time placing it, but they list different things. One of the things they all talk about is the breakdown of the family. You have to wonder why this has happened or why they feel the family is not as strong as they used to be, but they are right if you look at the statistics. If you look at the number of children born without both a mother and a father in the home, around 1960, that was only 5 percent; it was rare. Then the Lyndon Johnson-led Federal Government began a so-called war on poverty. I call it a war on marriage. Between 1960 and the mid 1990s, that 5-percent figure went up to 40 percent. Now, you may ask, was this just a coincidence? Did people believe in God less? Was getting married first as important? How did it happen? The American public should be aware that there are some people who always did want it to happen. Going back to Karl Marx, founder of Marxism, very connected with communism, the scourge of the 20th century, there was a goal to break down the family. They felt for the government to become preeminent, the family must shrink. The most important factor in raising children was no longer a mother and a father, it was the government. Beginning in the sixties, a variety of programs were passed, and it is kind of surprising because today we talk about equity which is close to equally. You would think the government would treat all Americans the same, but these programs provided benefits to people who had a certain income level. If you had a very low-income level, either because you weren't working yourself, or let's just take a woman as an example because there is no husband in the house working, you therefore became eligible for a variety of benefits, some of which began in the sixties and some of which have been added since that time. We are aware of these benefits, and one of the most generous is housing for people without a major breadwinner in the home, and that can amount to a $700 or $800 or $900 a month benefit. We are all aware of the food stamp benefit, which you are eligible for if there is not, say, a man who is a breadwinner in the house. We have medical benefits. We have something called Pell grants, which provide free college both to parents of people who are in poverty or a parent in poverty and to that person themselves. I would like to recount an anecdote on Pell grants. I have given a talk like this for many years in Wisconsin. I would always give them to what used to be called the Tea Party movement, which was usually made up of a bunch of guys who were over 60 years old, but I talked about the benefits that the government gave to people that weren't married at that time. I talked to a young gal, because she was different from anybody else, and I asked her what she thought about my talk. She said, well, me and my husband got married before we had children, but none of my friends are getting married. They get free college, which is right. I wonder whether Senator Pell, before he came up with the Pell grants, knew that within 30 years of introducing the Pell grants, the young people would catch on that the government wanted them not to get married so that way, their children would get free college or they, themselves, would get free college. We now have the TANF program, which gives cash benefits to people. Indeed, there are over 70 government programs in which your benefits are based on percentage of poverty, which is to say you get benefits if you are not working hard and if you are not married to a spouse who is working hard. As soon as you have one person who is working kind of hard, they are going to make enough money, then they are not eligible for all these programs. When you consider the powerful forces who wanted to get rid of the family, perhaps this is not a coincidence. In the 1960s in addition to the Marxists, we had the angry feminist movement. There were feminists like Kate Millett, a name I remember from my youth. If you look up her speeches or comments, she wanted to break down the family and not have men in the family. I don't think it is a coincidence that at the same time these programs were expanding, the power of the feminists in this institution increased, and the result was we are going to have to have less men in the family. There is another big program, the earned income tax credit, which could easily give $6,000 or $7,000 or $8,000, which was formed by Jack Kemp, an entirely misguided Republican, who felt it was good to put out another program conditioned upon not having a good breadwinner in the household. In any event, I think when all these programs are done, we did work our way up to a point in which 40 percent of the children were born without two parents in the house. The effect of this, not only on the children but on the men, was huge. There is an important author by the name of George Gilder who we have long since forgotten. He is still alive, still kicking, and I hope he is listening to me. George Gilder investigated what was sometimes called the ghetto in Albany, New York. He followed a young couple, an unmarried couple, when the gal got pregnant, and he expected--back in those days when you had an unmarried couple and the gal got pregnant, that was cause for concern. People were not happy that the gal was pregnant. It was, like, what are we going to do? He found out already by the 1970s that it was actually cause for celebration. The mother and the father went from government office to government office picking up all these benefits. It meant that she would no longer have to live with her mother, and he wouldn't have to live with his father. He shouldn't be living in the household but as a practical matter he was. So a benefit for having a child out of wedlock was, all of a sudden, you got housing. Now, since that time, we have done something called a title 42 tax credit in which the government pays for 70 percent of housing that a property developer, who may also be a campaign contributor, is able build low-income housing, new low-income housing, superior to rental properties, which most other people get, and people below a percentage of poverty are able to live in title 42 housing. The property developer, who has now built very nice properties because the government is paying for 70 percent of them, he becomes very wealthy, and the new family or the new mother and child wind up living in an apartment nicer than most other people live. But in any event, George Gilder's observation was not only does this put the child in the long run in a more difficult position--and people who work hard, there are all sorts of family backgrounds, and they are doing a tremendous job, I understand that. Another effect that I don't know was necessarily anticipated by Lyndon Johnson is they kind of took the purpose out of a man's life because now they have a basket of goodies for the mom. She may be making $40,000 a year, $30,000 a year, and pretty soon, the couple realizes that if the guy is going to come in and make $35,000 or $40,000 a year, materially, he has done nothing to add to the family. He winds up eventually realizing why am I going to live here? Maybe he moves out on his own, maybe mom kicks him out, but, in any event, we have made the man superfluous, which I think George Gilder would argue is the major effect of the war on poverty. They have taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. In any event, here we are in 2024 in a situation in which about 40 percent of children are born to a couple out of wedlock, and, obviously, with divorces or people breaking up, that number can wind up even higher, which is a huge tragedy for America. If we want to get America back to 1960, when this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs. Of course, as you have a family breakdown you have other problems that we are trying to deal with here. As you have less marriages, you have a higher abortion rate, so a lot of these abortions have to be attributed to the war on marriage begun by Lyndon Johnson. You have children who maybe don't do as well in school, which can be attributed to this or who are more likely to be depressed or more likely to commit crime or have guys who don't have a purpose in life and are more likely to just hang out and do drugs and that sort of thing. I think this is a huge issue, and it is something our slumbering press corps ought to take up with our candidates for President and see if they plan on doing anything about it since the war on poverty in the 1960s, I think, can universally be declared a complete failure. I would ask the press corps to look at this, and I would also ask leadership in both parties as they plan what they are going to do in January of 2025: Do you view this breakdown of the family as something the government should do something about? As far as I can tell it was largely caused by the government in the first place. People who wanted the breakdown of the family, people like Angela Davis, a well-known communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s, it appears that--not for everybody but for some of the principals who designed these programs--a goal was the destruction of the family. Of course, they have succeeded in that these single-family units are much more likely to depend upon the government. Every year, of course, I am lobbied by people who want the government, therefore, to take up an even greater role in their children's life, be it daycare, be it preschool, be it after-school programs, whatever. They clearly want the children raised by the government. I hope the press corps picks up on this, and I hope Republican and Democrat leadership put together some sort of plan for January in which we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s. The next issue I am going to take up, and it was debated on this floor quite a bit yesterday, but I don't think a certain tact was taken with regard to the bill. President Biden, one of the many things that he champions and is proud of that he has done here, weighed in on Title IX and is trying to force a certain view of transgenders on American schools. It would seem to me that in life today the transgenders, at least we are told, are very unhappy people compared to their peers. Nevertheless, the Biden administration has adopted rules, the message of which is if a young person feels a little bit like a transgender or wants to be a transgender since it is kind of portrayed as a positive lifestyle in the news, if someone wants to be that way, the schools have to go out of their way and accept this lifestyle and maybe even I would say accept it to the degree to which you would say you are promoting the lifestyle. We have to say the best studies of gender dysphoria show that between 80 and 95 percent of the children who claim to have a gender identity problem will snap out of it. If you read a book--what I think is the best book on the topic that I have read--maybe one of the worst things you can do to children like this is encourage them down the path--in other words, praise them for doing this, accept them for doing this, and you wind up in a situation in which they may not bounce out of it. This is my problem with the Biden rule. The rule is such that I believe that children who play with this sort of identity are more likely to wind up permanently experiencing this identity, rather than bouncing out of it as 80 to 90 percent are. In Europe, they have kind of backed off of the extreme view of this lifestyle situation because they realized that the more they talked about transgenderism, the more kids began to adopt it. They, therefore, feel that going all the way toward puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may be very damaging, and the children will just wind up getting back to the norm on their own. I think as we discuss this topic, a lot of the verbiage is aimed at men participating in girls' sports, but I hope we are also looking at the more we normalize this lifestyle, which seems to be connected with depression and unhappiness, the more we do that, the more children will go down that path, the more it will give the medical profession an opportunity to prescribe more drugs, and even in some cases, do more surgeries. When we have a President who in extreme cases is even telling boys that it is fine, you can pretend you are a girl, we will accept you as a girl, go out for the girls' soccer team or whatever, I think we are very likely harming that boy who would probably, according to the statistics, snap out of it, but, instead, he is going to start down a lifetime, which may include puberty blockers and may include depression as he comes to accept the norm of being something which he is not. I hope this side of the story will be taken up not only in this body but by conservative press outlets who just solely focus--which is an outrage too--on the unfairness of having a boy compete in a girl's sport but also think on what you are doing to the poor misguided people, boys who think they are girls or girls who think they are boys, because as you affirm this choice you are going to get more and more people going down that path and more and more people, I think, winding up with unhappy lives. I have other things to talk about, but I think I will leave that for next week. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, first of all, I thank Representative Miller for introducing this Congressional Review Act. I am old enough to remember when Title IX was passed back in 1972. I will guarantee you, there was not one Congressman in this Chamber who voted for that thing 50 years ago who believed that they were voting to require men be allowed in women's sports or requiring men to be allowed in the women's restroom. Nobody would have dreamed of that. It is maybe a good example of why we should never give the Federal Government more power around here. The question is: Why are we doing it? I think President Biden and the Democrats are doing it because he wants to sympathize with the most radical of LGBT agendas. The best studies of gender dysphoria show that between 80 and 95 percent of the children who expressed discordant gender identity will eventually come to identify with their bodily sex. When we try to normalize this, when we try to say it is okay for guys to participate in women's sports or okay for guys to use the women's restroom, what we are doing is lessening the chances that people will kind of come out of it and go back to their natural gender. I believe that is the goal of President Biden's order. In any event, I am glad we have this resolution. I think we should pass this resolution so that local school districts are not required to agree with somebody's feelings and are not forced to go into a situation in which a person with these feelings is encouraged down this path and, in some ways, made to feel like someone who is somewhat of a hero for going down this path. We must stand firm in protecting the rights and safety of women and girls, preserving due process, and ensuring fairness in our educational institutions.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, another week has gone by and another week of the press corps leaving aside writing about the greatest long-term issue facing our country, and that is the breakdown of the family, beginning in the 1960s with the most recent Marxist and feminists like Kate Millett, later on a communist by the name of Angela Davis, and later on, Black Lives Matter. Our country keeps marching toward the end of the nuclear family, and programs ever since that time are clearly designed with this in mind, such as section 42 housing tax credits giving better housing to people who are not married than people who are, healthcare, earned income tax credit of $6,000 to $7,000 a year, TANF cash, and special programs for disabled kids for which only single parents are eligible. It is time for the press to look at these programs. Frequently, it is costing over $25,000 for young couples to get married rather than to not keep both parents in the house. I ask the press corps to wake up and make this an issue in this year's presidential campaign.

Mr. GROTHMAN

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

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, we had a debate last night, and, obviously, a lot of Americans are discussing public policy. I want to address what I consider the three greatest crises facing America today, only one of which was brought up by the press last night. The one brought up by the press last night, which cannot be overstated, is the crisis at the border. I was disappointed that last night, people did not talk about the size of the crisis. We are in a situation right now in which we have about a quarter of a million people crossing our border every month. Under President Trump, that number, depending on the month, was between 5,000 and 10,000 people. We have gone from 10,000 to over 200,000 people coming here last month, and I think the press should be doing a better job of describing the size of that crisis. I think they also have to do a better job of questioning the amount of legal immigrants that are coming here. Some people are under the impression or seem to be under the impression that people coming to this country, and as a result, changing this country is only on the southern border. Actually, we have almost a million people a year, depending on the year, 850 to 950,000 people coming here legally. It is not impossible for people to come here, and I think there ought to be more focus on the 900,000 or 950,000 people who are sworn in every year as Americans. I also think there ought to be more focus, depending on the month, on the 7,000 to 9,000 unaccompanied minors coming in this country. For those of us who watched the debate last night, President Biden tried to weigh in on supposedly people kept apart from their parents. That was for a short period of time because their parents committed crimes. Here we have between 7,000 and 9,000 people coming in every month who are unaccompanied by either parent. As a result, I think it is possible that they will never see their parents again, but the press does not emphasize or talk about what should absolutely be discussed in this country, that being, should we continue to allow children in this country without either of their parents present. If we are going to do it, what is going to become of those children because we do know that, depending upon your source, tens of thousands of these children are not only in this country without their parents, but we don't even know where they are. I think we have to talk a lot more about what is going on at our southern border and talk a lot more in specifics as to do we continue to allow unaccompanied minors in this country, and exactly how many people coming into this country described as illegally should be allowed. We should talk about the fact that we have a new program under President Biden in which 30,000 people a month, or 360,000 people a year, are being let in through the parole program if you are Haitian, if you are Cuban, or if you are from some Central American countries. Another significant way America is changing is not being addressed. The next issue that I would like to talk about, we had a hearing yesterday touching upon the idea of racial preferences or racial breaks in employment, be it government employment or be it employment in businesses that do business with contractors. It seems strange that in America we have programs based on the theory that we have a huge amount of racism in America. We live at a time in which the wealthiest Americans or the wealthiest group is people from India; the second wealthiest group, in the sources that I find, Philippines; third wealthiest group, Chinese. People from Cuba are doing very well. People from other countries in the Caribbean are doing well. There is this drumbeat that America has a horrible racist past or a horrible racist present, which I just think is not true all. We have to ask about the motivation of people who keep these programs coming in which we identify people by where their great-great- grandparents come from. There recently was a book that came out called ``America's Cultural Revolution'' by a guy by the name of Christopher Rufo, which kind of confirmed my worst suspicions. The reason why we are taking almost all of these immigrant groups and trying to give them preferences is that the goal is to divide America. There is a small but determined number of progressives in America who would like to permanently change America, have a different form of government. These people have been around in America in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. They have certainly been around in the sixties. During most of this time, they felt the way to overthrow America or permanently change America was through a class system, and they wanted to turn everybody against the wealthy people and have a revolution based on this, and we would have a new or different kind of government. Well, eventually in the seventies or eighties, they gave up on that. They realized that wouldn't work. The American middle class is too strong. Americans love their freedom too much. They were not going to be able to succeed in giving us a different form of government by breaking people down into how much money they were making. It came to some of them that one way we could destroy America is create friction via race. In the early eighties, they decided that is what they were going to try to do, and they would go through America's institutions, the first institutions being the institutions based on education. Again, it seems to me absurd that of all countries in the world, you could divide America or make America unstable based on race. There are other countries in which there are racial or religious divides that really divide the country. In India, you look at the Hindu and the Muslim. In Nigeria, you look at the Hindu and the Muslim. In Iraq, you look at the Shiite and the Sunni. You can even look at a country like Canada, which has problems because you have the English speakers and the French speakers or a huge number of countries in Africa, which are broken down by racial Tribes. America is such a great melting pot. We all get along so well. As just mentioned, people come here from all around the globe other than Europe and succeed wildly. It seems bizarre that anybody would say the way to break down America is to divide based on race, but that is what they are trying to do. Another example of a lack of racism in America is if you look up the new people who come to America, who are sworn in as new citizens, and they have these ceremonies in Wisconsin every month in the city of Milwaukee. I have attended several of them. At least none of the 10 countries that we allow to come in here and get sworn in as American citizens are European countries. They are countries from southeast Asia. They are countries from the Indian subcontinent. They are countries from all over Latin America. I mean, it seems almost ridiculous that someone would say that America has a racist problem or are so euro-centric when the vast majority of people who we allow to become citizens are not of European decent. Another thing that makes it so strange or shows how divisive the left is trying to be is they do all they can to tell as many people as possible that they are being picked on and should view themselves as a separate ethnic identity. How do they do that? They do it by giving preferences, be it in government contracting, be it in government employment, based on race, regardless of how well you have it otherwise. Here in America, people pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion will say that if my grandparents came here from India, and I am in the process of inheriting $20 million, I still get preferences. When I go to the ballot box, presumably, I should be looking out for other people from India or be looking out for other people of Japan and not just voting as an American. Another example of this is their bizarre idea of trying to define people by where they come from. I will give you an example. Right now, if somebody comes here from Spain, they are not considered a picked- upon minority, but if somebody with Spanish ancestors spends three or four generations in Cuba, they are considered to be Latin Americans in need of special help. Obviously, I don't think the average American could tell the difference between somebody who came here from Spain or somebody who had Spanish ancestry who went through Cuba, but in the eyes of DEI specialists, in an effort to get as many people as possible walking around with a chip on their shoulder, in an effort to ingratiate themselves to as many different people as possible, their rules are such that if you are of Spanish descent but your ancestors spent a couple of generations in Cuba, we need to give you special privileges as far as government contracting, government hiring, and being hired by companies that do business with the government. It is something that I think we have to bring up more. I think it is something that should be a topic in America. We recently added a new group to get preferences for government contracts or get preferences in government hiring, and that is a group of people called North Africans or Middle Easterners. Again, even though immigrants here from Iran do very well, are very great people, and, as a result, succeed overwhelmingly in America, the Biden administration has said that if you come here and your ancestors are from Iran, Egypt, Morocco, or Gaza, quite frankly, you will be treated as an aggrieved minority and will be given preferences over Americans who are already in the United States. We should discuss whether that was the right thing. The incompetent American press corps has hardly publicized that. I go home and explain this to the people back home. They ask why they never heard of it. They never heard of it because the American press corps isn't particularly competent, but that is something that should have been discussed. It should have been discussed at the debate last night. The press should have said: Are you in favor of the policy that if an immigrant comes here from Iran, Syria, Gaza, or Morocco, they will be given preferences over the native-born Americans when it comes to government hiring, working for government contractors, or being the beneficiary of a government contract, or, for that matter, being the beneficiary of a government grant? I strongly encourage the press corps to educate Americans on what is going on here and to see whether we should continue with this policy. I mentioned for a second, by the way, people who are working for companies with a government grant. Very few people know that if you have a company that does business with the government and you have at least 50 employees and do $10,000 of business with the Federal Government, you are required to fill out a form every year listing the racial background of every one of your employees together with their compensation and job description. The purpose of those forms is so that the government can look at them and perhaps cause trouble for you if the answers on the form are not what they like. Again, if you are working, say, for a company like General Motors, which I am sure does a lot of business with the government, most people do not know that they are required to fill out a form every year listing the race, sex, and compensation of every employee. Is that something we should be doing? As a result, it means that when it comes to hiring, promoting, or letting people go, your race will play into how those decisions are made. I think that is something that should be discussed more. We had a hearing on some of this the other day. I do not think America can remain the great country that it is if we are teaching our immigrant groups particularly that they should be asking for or expecting something based on their racial history, not to mention it does not deal with merit. Inevitably, if you are saying that you are not going to pick the best person, that you are going to pick persons by their background, and that you are going to lower the quality of engineers, lower the quality of product that these companies put out, lower the quality of our medical professionals, what have you. It is time to get rid of this stuff. Most of these rules began to be put into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson, so we have lived with them. I think the companies are more afraid of them now, but we have lived with them for 55 years. It is time to put an end to these programs. One more comment as far as the effect it is having on the native born. There was a study done not long ago of 88 companies in the S&P 200. When they got done looking at the number of people hired during 2001-2002 in those companies, 74 percent were non-White. What does that indicate? If almost none of the new hires were White, it indicates to me that the companies were going out of their way, due to the pressure to be all DEI, to not hire White people. I do believe somebody should look into this further and see why only 6 percent of the new hires were White. The next issue that was not debated last night, but it is what I thought, was the number one issue facing America when I ran for this job 10 years ago--sadly, we are not talking about it--when you talk to people my age, they uniformly feel that America is not as great a country or as favorable a country to live in as the country we grew up in. When you ask them why, one of the top two or three reasons-- frequently, the number one reason--is the breakdown in the family. The breakdown in the family did not just happen. There are people who have never wanted the old-fashioned nuclear family to succeed or be dominant in the United States. This goes back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote at length about the fact that they wanted to get rid of the family. They wanted the dominant unit to be the government. They wanted the government to raise people. They wanted the government to brainwash people or teach people how to think. It is, unfortunately, apparently not uncommon for people in American universities to follow or be a little bit entranced by the writings of Marx and Engels. As a result, we see Americans, say, in the 1960s, some of the leading feminists, some of the people involved in the Black liberation movement, were outright opponents of the old-fashioned nuclear family. Angela Davis was an example of somebody well known by people of my age who was a very important revolutionary figure in the 1960s who eventually came out for the breakdown of the family. There are right now approximately 78 programs in which your eligibility for the program is based on the income level of your household. Due to the way they calculate poverty, it means that if you have one decent wage earner in the household, you probably aren't eligible for these programs. This means, as a practical matter, if you have one parent, frequently the mother, in the household, she is eligible for all sorts of benefits--free housing, free food, free healthcare, and free Pell grants to go to college. If she would marry someone with a decent income, she would lose all of these benefits. Another benefit that can easily be $6,000 to $8,000 is the earned income tax credit. If she decides to work a little, she also may be eligible for free daycare. You add up these benefits, and it is not unusual to find hypotheticals in which someone can be penalized by $25,000 or $30,000 in tax-free income if you decide to be married. Conversely, you can lose $25,000 or $30,000 if you decide to be married. This is a problem that has been pointed out since Senator Moynihan in the late 1960s, so nothing has been done about it. The rate of children born without a mother and father at home has skyrocketed since the middle 1960s when these programs were put into effect. As a matter of fact, usually what we do is throw more money into these programs. In the current budget that Congress is working through for the year beginning October 1, President Biden did try to increase the number of these programs, which, in other words, is to put more of a bribe on people to not live in what they call the old-fashioned nuclear family. By the way, another group that does not like the nuclear family or what they describe as the so-called Western-prescribed nuclear family was the original founders of Black Lives Matter. It is shocking the number of people who work in this Chamber who were happy even after Black Lives Matter came out against the nuclear family and who would stand by it, who would attend rallies with those signs out there. It just shows the power of people who have this antifamily agenda. In any event, I am very interested in, when the new Congress is sworn in next January, what the new President who will work with that Congress thinks about the huge marriage penalties we have in our society. Seemingly, in this country, we seem to have a goal of having more and more people raised in single-parent families rather than married couples. A variety of problems come from this. There are wonderful children raised by all parents, but statistically, it would be better in many cases, probably most cases, to have both a mother and father at home. The current system, which frequently discourages, in particular, the father from being at home, takes away the purpose in a lot of these men's lives. I think a lot of the problems we have in society--depression, crime, drugs--can be attributed to the fact that the American Government today seems to not want to give men a purpose in life by encouraging them to be part of an old-fashioned nuclear family. In any event, I ask the press corps, as they cover the Presidential race, to see where the candidates stand on the idea of racial preferences. Should we continue to say, for example, that if somebody is one-quarter Peruvian, they, therefore, can fill out the form and say they are an aggrieved minority? I wonder, do they agree with the idea that immigrants who come here from Iran or Gaza are immediately entitled to preferences in government employment or preferences in hiring by corporations? I would like to know that. I would like to know where the candidates stand on the huge marriage penalties we have in effect, which appear to be put in place by people who do not want children raised with both parents at home. Do they plan on doing something about it? I would like to know because it is one of the biggest problems we are facing in America. It is not talked about. Then, when it comes to illegal immigration, I would like a little more discussion of numbers. If we are going to begin to take people outside the normal pathway to become a citizen, how many people should that be every month? Should it be 5,000 a month, like we had under President Trump? Should it be 200,000? Should it be 300,000? Should it be over 400,000? I don't know, but I think the press should try to nail down the candidates on that. In any event, those are three issues that I think a competent press corps would be putting out there in the newspapers so that people can analyze those issues and decide which way the government wants to handle each one of those issues. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I couldn't reach the voting machine. Had I been present, I would have voted AYE on Roll Call No. 300. Amendment No. 9 Offered by Mr. Burchett

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Amendment No. 20 seeks to address an often underdiscussed part of the ongoing border crisis: the surge in illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of migrants from these four countries attempting to cross our southwest border. In fiscal year 2020, Border Patrol agents apprehended about 17,500 illegal entrants from these nations. That was the final year before President Biden. This number surged more than tenfold in fiscal year 2021 to 181,000 and skyrocketed to over 600,000 in fiscal year 2022. From 17,000 to 600,000, these numbers are common in the increase during this administration. Understanding the factors behind this dramatic rise is crucial to understanding the challenges it poses. The Biden administration's approach to border security has played a significant role in this surge. Look no further than the introduction of the CHNV parole process targeting nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Initially created as a limited parole program for Venezuelans, this program expanded significantly in January of 2023. Now it offers parole for up to 30,000 nationals per month from these countries. Remember, we used to have 17,000 in a whole year. Now it is 30,000 per month. This policy has led to a system of all carrots and no sticks, incentivizing illegal entries without adequate deterrents. Through the end of May, over 462,000 CHNV parolees have entered the U.S. This figure surpasses the current population of New Orleans just from these four countries and far exceeds the annual immigration limits set by Congress. Despite these parolees lacking visas or legal rights to enter, they have been granted work authorizations, potentially impacting the wages and working conditions of American workers. The administration claims that each CHNV applicant undergoes robust security vetting and requires a U.S.-based supporter. However, this system is ripe for exploitation, human trafficking, and fraud. Moreover, the security vetting process is insufficient, particularly given the limited cooperation from hostile governments and the lack of a stable government in Haiti. When I have been on the border, the only country they get criminal background checks from is Canada. My amendment is straightforward. None of the funds appropriated by this act can be used to run the CHNV parole program. Congress must act to correct these misguided policies, prioritize the enforcement of existing immigration laws, and ensure that our border security measures are both effective and humane. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Turner).

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I urge all Members to support this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, the CHNV program is another example of this administration clearly violating the limits on parole established by Congress. None of the migrants being paroled into this Nation under this program have a legal basis to enter. Mr. Chair, I urge all Members to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Madam Speaker, I would like to talk about the latest front in the Biden administration's war on the middle class. They are all for the welfare class, and they are all for the superrich, but not the middle class. We are used to hearing about the massive increase in costs of cars and light trucks as we are forced into electric vehicles. At least as I understand it, talking to my dealers, the cost of a car is probably going to go up about 25 percent. We are used to also hearing about the massive increase in car insurance that we are going to have as we go to electric vehicles. We don't hear about the huge hammer coming down on the backbone of the American middle class, the American truck driver. I found out today that the cost of a new semi going from diesel to electric vehicle will go from $130,000 to over $300,000 a semi. As far as the amount that you are able to drive before refueling: from 1,200 miles back down to only 325 miles. Congress must act to prevent President Biden's latest war on the truck driver, the backbone of the American middle class.

Mr. GROTHMAN

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Iowa (Mrs. Miller-Meeks). Women Veterans Recognition Day

Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the first issue I would like to take up this afternoon that has not received anywhere near the discussion it demands in this Chamber concerns the month of June. As everyone knows, June is Dairy Month in the United States of America. The number one dairy product which most milk goes for in this country is cheese, and the number one cheese-producing State in the country is Wisconsin. The number one district for dairy farms happens to be the Sixth Congressional District of Wisconsin. In any event, there are many things that good cheese is used in, and Wisconsin cheese is the best. This was proven once again in the 35th biennial World Champion Cheese Contest, which is the most respected and honored technical cheese and butter competition in the world. Earlier this year, Wisconsin cheesemakers demonstrated their exceptional craftmanship earning 117 cheese awards, more awards than the combined total of the subsequent six highest-earning countries. Wisconsin's cheesemaking heritage goes back more than 180 years. The State is home to 1,200 licensed cheesemakers who produce more than 600 varieties. Sometime if you come to Wisconsin, spend an evening driving around the countryside, and you will see many cheesemakers open and working past midnight. Today, please pick up some delicious Wisconsin cheese, and enjoy it no matter which type you prefer. Whether you are purchasing it from the Cascade Cheese Company, Cedar Valley, Gibbsville, Grande Cheese, Henning's Cheese, Baker Cheese, Laack Brothers Cheese, Masters Gallery, LaClare, Sargento, Sartori, Pine River, Union Star, Willow Creek, or Widmer's cheese out of Theresa, they are all great. Again, whether you buy provolone, mozzarella, Colby, or sharp cheddar, they are all tremendous. I would like to one more time thank the wonderful cheesemakers in Wisconsin for making Wisconsin America's Dairyland. The second issue that we have to discuss today, and it has been discussed just about every week, but we still don't discuss it enough, is the number one issue facing America today, and that is the people flowing across the southern border. Our office has been in contact with the Border Patrol. They do not see any change in the people coming across the border. I want to remind people in the last month for which we have statistics--and the press should be waiting for the next month's numbers to come out--in April, we were at 205,000 migrants remaining in the interior, and that is before you count another 30,000 paroled from Cuba, Haiti, and Central America. That is an all-time record for that month. With it, as always, comes about 9,000 unaccompanied minors. If we found an unaccompanied 12-year-old wandering around the streets at night, we would think that was a scandal, but every month we let another 8 or 9,000 unaccompanied minors come into this country. I call upon the press corps to finally report the number of people who come across this May and make a guess at the number of additional people who are being paroled. A year ago in May, we were at 196,000. Now, what you have to do is you have to take the official number, add up the got-aways, and then you should add up those paroled to see where we stand this year. When it comes out, it should be a banner headline, and something that all Americans should be deeply concerned about. Whether you are talking about illegals committing crimes, whether they are putting pressure on local budgets at the school board, whether they are changing the culture of America because they think worldwide most people do not have the respect and love for freedom that we do in this country, but for whatever purpose, this is a real tragedy and something that is going to permanently change America. I beg the press corps to give us a banner headline, and see where the May figures line up with those of a year ago. The next issue that hasn't been talked about anywhere near enough concerns what is going on in the Middle East. You know, one more time when I leave here today, I am going to see protestors saying that the Arabs who live in Gaza--they call them Palestinians--need their own country, and they are living in some sort of horrible situation in a country and that even though Israelis don't live there, Israelis have ultimate control over the Gaza Strip. In a report which was in a story that was underreported, but we all should be aware of, recently another agreement was reached with Israel and another country around the world to bring more people, non-Jewish people, into Israel to perform work in this wonderful country. I have had the privilege to go to Israel. I have seen what they have done at their border, along the Jordan River, about all the immigration that happens, about all the industry that is going on there, but in any event, it appears as though under a recent agreement immediately 2,000 people from Ecuador on the other side of the world are agreeing to come to Israel to work. Under this agreement there is a hope that eventually they will work their way up to 25,000 people from Ecuador coming to Israel. Now, that is in addition to a sea of other people who are already there from India, from Thailand, from Philippines, from China, from Nepal, from Sri Lanka, from Moldova, Malawi, from Kenya. All around the globe, people are coming to Israel to work. Nevertheless, there are some malcontents in this country who feel that it is difficult living in a country adjacent to Israel, a country which, by the way, the people in Gaza many of them had an opportunity to work in Israel where they were making better wages, and probably had safer jobs than almost anywhere else in the Arab world. I hope--and I haven't seen it anywhere in the newspaper--the press picks up on this story that 25,000 people from Ecuador are hopeful to come to Israel. Israel, in so many ways, reminds me of the United States. In the United States we have hundreds of thousands of people crossing the southern border. We are just a little bit shy of a million people being legally sworn in to become new citizens in America every year from all over the globe. Nevertheless, we have people in this Chamber, actually earlier today, making a claim that America is a horribly racist country, and we have to do something to fundamentally change it because it is so bad. People make fun of this country, but the whole rest of the world would rather live here, apparently, than anywhere else. I hope the press picks up the point that we have people from all around the globe coming to Israel and that another 25,000 people from Ecuador want to go there, and that would give an indication of what it is really like to live in Israel even from countries that are not primarily Jewish. Now, we are going the pickup another story that I think--probably the border right now is the number one issue that the United States has to deal with. Under normal circumstances when I talk to people back home, they tell me that things in America are getting worse, particularly at my age when you get up to 60, 65. They feel that when they were growing up, America was a better nation, and they wonder what happened. When I ask them why they think it was a better nation, they hesitate for a minute, but finally they say that they think we have had a breakdown in the family. It is true, particularly with older people, we went from 1960 when about 95 percent of the newborn births had both a mother and father at home to more recently only about 60 percent have a mother and father at home. We have had a dramatic decrease in the number of children born that are living without a mother or a father. Now, any type of family can be successful, but common sense and the statistics will tell you it would be nicer if you had a father at home. Nevertheless, we are going in the opposite direction. You may say, Glenn, why are you even wasting time on that. Everybody is for the old- fashioned family, why do you spend time on that? Actually, if you look, there have been people who, over a period of time, have felt that the road to paradise necessarily means getting rid of the nuclear family. We know Karl Marx himself, who is still studied in our universities, was opposed to what he referred to as the bourgeois family. He felt it would vanish as a matter of course when capitalism disappears. He believed the only reason for the family is because we have private property, and that served as the basis for traditional marriage, which it didn't. In any event, Karl Marx did want to get rid of the nuclear family. Did anybody else carry this odious thing? Or was he just a guy who died almost without family and not missed at the time he passed away? I think we have to turn to the 1960s when we started the great welfare state, the Great Society, of Lyndon Johnson. At that time, there were some leaders who were very well-known to anybody who lived through that era who did want to get rid of the family. The first person I will mention is Kate Millett. Maybe some people aren't familiar with Kate Millett. She was one of the primary feminists during the 1960s, and I will bet to this day most Americans are under the mistaken impression that people like Kate Millett were a force for good. Actually, Kate Millett, we should all be aware, was another person who wanted to ``destroy the American family.'' In a back-and-forth with one of her other audiences, she demanded, how do we make a cultural revolution? She felt we needed a cultural revolution. Her follower said by destroying the American family. She said, how do we destroy the American family? It is by destroying the American patriarch--in other words, by getting the man out of the family. In the 1960s, one of the most prominent feminists, Kate Millett, and her comments were echoed by others, felt that she had to destroy the American family. At the same time we had a Black Power movement, which I don't think was embraced by the vast majority of Black Americans, but it did exist. One of the primary leaders of that Black Power movement was Angela Davis. Anybody who lived in the 1970s remembers that name. What was Angela Davis for? One of the things she was for was she wanted to get rid of the family-based structure of oppression. In other words, she, as well, felt a mother and father at home raising their children was a form of oppression. Women must be liberated from the drudgery of full-time childrearing. She was given a great job at California State University at Santa Cruz, where the left made sure she had a nice job for the rest of her life even though she participated in or abetted murders that took place in California at the time. We have to remember that one of the things that Angela Davis wanted, because she is primarily remembered for being a member of the Black Power movement, was to get rid of the nuclear family. Mr. Speaker, how could one get rid of the family? I think Lyndon Johnson, at the time when these radicals were flying high, hit upon it by introducing a lot of subsidies in America as part of his Great Society. In order to get these subsidies, not always, but almost always, you could not have a mother and father together because if you had a mother and father together, then you would be earning enough money that you wouldn't be considered in poverty, but once you were in poverty, you were eligible for a variety of government subsidies. Mr. Speaker, these were government subsidies that you wouldn't get if you had a mother and father at home, and let's say that father was making, in today's income, $50,000 or $60,000. Whether it is food stamps, whether it is low-income housing, whether it is daycare, whether it was, at the time, AFDC, or whether it was a hugely poorly done subsidy, the earned income tax credit, which kicked in in the 1990s, all of these benefits were conditioned upon not having a man in the household earning a decent income. There were probably some exceptions, and my detractors will point out somewhere a mother and father and kids at home who are getting these subsidies. By and large, they were subsidies not available to a family with a man and woman who both worked or with one of the two working and making a decent wage. Now, in this budget that President Biden has put forth, we have a variety of new programs, almost all of which are adding to the marriage penalty that the Great Society ushered in. By the way, Mr. Speaker, when you look at that marriage penalty, it varies from person to person, depending on how many jobs they took up. It varies depending upon their income whether you are not working at all or whether you are making $14,000 or $15,000 a year. There is usually a huge medical benefit, as well. What do we do in light of all of these programs? Robert Rector, who is an expert in this field, believes there are 78 programs that all are working toward a marriage penalty. All are working toward a world where Kate Millett or Angela Davis or Karl Marx were looking for. By the time you got done, it could be $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, $30,000 that you would lose if you were a married couple as opposed to having a single person raising the children at home. Now, Mr. Speaker, you would think that, ultimately, people would wake up and look at, not in every case but in general, all the possible problems that we had with the government encouraging not having two people living at home. By the way, another one I should point out is something called Pell grants. Pell grants are grants that go to children if they can say the custodial parent is in poverty. They might have a father making $100,000 a year, who knows, but Pell grants is another program kind of pushing in that direction. I will repeat an anecdote I have talked about before, but before we expand Pell grants, we ought to think about it. I used to talk about the marriage penalty about 12 years ago in Wisconsin at a variety of Tea Party groups. I would go through all the programs that you got, provided you didn't get married and had a low income. I talked to a young woman afterward who was in the audience. I had been talking to a Tea Party group. Anybody familiar with the Tea Party at the time knows it was largely a bunch of people over 60 years old. We had a young gal who was there tending bar in the room where I gave the talk. I am guessing she was 25 years old. I asked her what she thought about this marriage penalty and all these programs. She told me: Well, me and my husband got married before we had a child. None of my friends are getting married. They get free college. That was kind of my introduction to Pell grants in which the government, for whatever reason, has decided to say that if you are not married to someone with an income, then you are eligible to go to college as well as your children may be eligible as well to get Pell grants while the middle-class kid, the kid who is raised by a couple who maybe has a middle-class income, they may not be able to afford college for the kid, and that kid has to take out student loan debt. Again, Pell grant is another program that is kind of designed to push America more toward the paradise that some of these people want, or the so-called paradise in which we do not have a mother and father at home. In any event, in President Biden's budget, he wants to expand government daycare, expand the earned income tax credit, which can easily give you $6,000 or $10,000 if you have a couple of kids, provided you don't have two parents working or anybody making more than $16,000. I should point out that all of these programs not only discourage marriage, but they discourage work because usually to get the most out of these programs, you want to work and make $14,000, $15,000, or $16,000. You sure don't want to make $40,000 or $50,000 because they will take away your benefits. He wants more housing subsidies as opposed to staying with mom. He wants to expand these Pell grants I just talked about. So, I encourage my Republican colleagues to stand up against President Biden's goal of further subsidizing and further trying to break down the old-fashioned family. By the way, I mentioned all the people whose goal it was to get rid of the nuclear family. I should have included Black Lives Matter in that group that wanted to get rid of the so-called Western-prescribed nuclear family, which is really not Western. It happens all around the world. That is a more recent group. Black Lives Matter had as one of its goals to get rid of the nuclear family. I encourage my colleagues to stand up to President Biden's goal of further taxing the middle class or taxing certain groups to further promote or subsidize the idea of raising families without both parents in the home. In any event, these are stories I wish the press would cover. This marriage penalty has been going on for 60 years. Whenever I talk about it, nobody has heard of it. Where is the press corps? They ought to be talking about the huge penalty. Again and again when I get back to my district, I find young people saying: We are not getting married because we lose the benefits. Let's have the press corps pick up on that. Let's have the press corps pick up on why Ecuador wants to send 25,000 people halfway around the globe to work in Israel, and they can ponder if things are that tough. These people protesting out here on Independence Avenue should also consider whether or not it is so tough living in Israel when actually it is a paradise. People are coming from all around the globe. The next thing that I want the press to pick up on is you should be waiting every day when we get the new figures on the number of people who came across our southern border in May and report if we are getting another all-time record for May or not. I know I am probably going to have to pick it up from some obscure government website because, again, our press corps is asleep at the switch on the issue of the decade. Finally, if we want a little upbeat thing the press corps is not paying enough attention to, remember: June is Dairy Month. Go home and have some cheese. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.