Being A Moral and Religious Country

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, first of all, just so you all know, you don't have to worry about waiting 30 minutes. It is not going to be that long.

I would like to talk about some issues tonight that I don't feel have been adequately addressed in this forum. The press--not the people back home, but the press--keeps trying to make a big deal out of January 6.

When I go home, as I am sure for all of my colleagues who go home, 80 percent of the comments deal with inflation, insofar as other things are being dealt with. It is not January 6.

Nevertheless, there is something that bothers me. Since we are apparently going to have these hearings on January 6, everything ought to be able to come out. If I was on that committee, the first thing I would ask is for all the video from the Capitol that day to be released.

It seems to me if people genuinely want to know what is going on, that is where I would start. Therefore, on last October 5, myself, Congressman Norman, and Congressman Gohmert asked for all the video from the Capitol to be released that day. It doesn't seem that much of a difficult request. There were many people still being held in jail, and the press kept trying to rile up the population and let them believe something horrible had happened.

I received inquiries from both Republican and Democrat constituents who felt it would be a good idea if we released the video of what was going on that day. It would be helpful if Congresswoman Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger also weighed in, saying all that video should be released. But for whatever reason, it hasn't been released.

One more time, Congressmen Norman, Gohmert, and myself have had to make a request of the Justice Department to release these videos. It is getting to the point where no longer is it just an innocent inquiry because a few people asked for it. People are beginning to think that the Justice Department must be hiding something.

One more time, we make the request. The request should be made by the Capitol press corps. There was a time when press in this country, one of their goals was to get behind the curtain in front of government and expose what was really going on, and both conservative and liberal journalists would have quickly asked for these videos. For whatever reason, they haven't asked for them.

I, again, ask the Department of Justice to release them. But above all, because I don't think the Justice Department apparently cares what Congressmen Norman, Gohmert, or Grothman say, the press in this country that seems obsessed with January 6 ought to demand that the Justice Department release these videos. After all, it has been 16 months, 17 months, after this took place. It has been 18 months after this took place. It is high time we found out what was going on there.

Every day that goes forward in which the video is not released, I think the American public, the small amount that is paying attention, is going to be more convinced that somebody is hiding something.

Now, I don't want to accuse anybody of anything. I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but my constituents are wondering, when I write that letter, why we are sitting on the video. If it is so important to find out what really went on that day, please, Department of Justice, release the hidden videos and, please, comatose American press corps, ask that the videos be released.

I have spoken from this microphone many times this biennium about a tilt toward the totalitarian sort of government that we see going on. And by totalitarian, I mean the worst type of totalitarian, a Marxist totalitarian government.

We see a variety of danger signs on the horizon. We began this session with people being sworn in who, in order to get elected, got help from Black Lives Matter, a group whose founders made no bones about the fact that they were Marxist and made no bones about the fact that they were against the traditional American family, what they described as the Western nuclear family.

We have then seen online media giants suppress free speech. Now, I suppose you could say they are private companies, and I suppose you could say it is their right to suppress free speech or prevent you from googling something, from getting a cross section of views that are out there.

Nevertheless, we know, as a practical matter, they have almost a monopoly in this country, and it is concerning that these companies that have, as a practical matter, monopolies have decided to suppress certain speech. They certainly have the heart of a totalitarian atheist.

The next thing we look at is a growing percentage of the gross national product no longer being spent by the people who earn the money but being spent by the government, by the politicians in Washington. That is another danger sign.

We see a President openly talking about taking away the freedom to defend yourself. He wants the only guns to be owned by government employees. He didn't want the right of defense to rest with the individual. This would be another trait of a government very different from that which our forefathers anticipated.

We saw an effort made to have our government deny visas or deny property to foreigners if they engaged in suppression of human rights. But the human rights that we know the Biden administration meant were not fear of murder or robbery or something. The human rights were aimed at the field of pro-life, so that politicians or other people abroad who fought for pro-life issues, or issues with regard to so-called gay rights, if you weren't on the right side, the Biden administration wanted to threaten foreign officials with taking away the right for a visa in this country, taking away their right to travel, as well as taking away their property in this country.

Does that sound like kind of a dangerous thing?

America had better wake up. We are going the wrong way. John Adams said our Constitution is made for a moral and religious people and is totally unfit for any other kind.

When you listen to the things that have been going on in this country, what do you think? Aren't we headed for a very different country than the moral and religious country that is required to keep our country going?

There are other things that kind of just amaze me. June is Dairy Month. Being from Wisconsin, everybody in Wisconsin knows June is Dairy Month. But for some people around Washington, they don't think primarily of Dairy Month. They call it Pride Month, and the U.S. flies the gay flag, and the Vatican, as well as many other countries around the world.

Do you think our forefathers would have anticipated, particularly given all the blessings that our country has been given, that we would decide to fly our flag with, in essence, a sexual preference flag all around the world? Again, highly questionable.

Then, we have another step in a very unusual direction for a country that was supposed to be a moral and religious country. We are sending out requests for grants from nonprofits around the world to promote humanism and atheism. Isn't that kind of unusual?

Here we are, such a blessed country. What do we do with our money? Why, we say, does anybody around the world want to promote atheism?

As recently as the 1960s in this country, only 2 percent of the people said they did not believe in God, only 2 percent in the 1960s. Look how far down we have gone. Now, we elect a government and are asking for grants to be given to organizations to promote atheism in our name.

I mean, when you look at the State Department, I guess the two things that they will tell people abroad are, if you want to be like the United States, if you want to follow in its footsteps, follow the pride flag and follow atheism. Very, very disappointing. I think it is time that the clergy and the people of America wake up.

I know we are just supposed to talk about inflation. Of course, inflation is bad, and, of course, this bad inflation was caused by excessive government spending. That is all true. But there are other issues that are going on out there as well, and I am very afraid, given how quickly we have gone downhill the last 40 or 20 or 10 years, where we are going to wind up in another 10 or 20 or 30 years if this sort of activity continues to come from our government in Washington.

While we took our 2-week break, we hit 100 murders a year in the city of Milwaukee. If that happens in the second half of the year, we are going to wind up hitting the all-time-record number of murders in Milwaukee, a city that is directly adjacent to my district.

We have to ask ourselves, what can we do to reduce the number of murders? Part of it, I have always felt, is the decline in the traditional family. We have spoken, again, from this microphone about the degree to which our welfare programs seem conditioned upon either not working or, above all, make sure if you have children, you don't have them in wedlock because if you have a two-earner household, it is very difficult to take advantage of all these grants.

Mr. Speaker, this is where some of it comes from, but some of it also comes from kind of the neutering of the police corps by having irresponsible politicians calling the police, in general, racists.

When you call all the police racists, which I don't think they are, you create a chilling influence. Police, particularly in big cities with high crime rates, where it may be more important they engage the citizenry than anywhere else, the police back off. When they back off, you have something that is almost unbelievable to see: a hundred murders in the first half of the year in the city of Milwaukee.

By the way, I was born in the city of Milwaukee, and as recently as the early 1970s, Milwaukee had the lowest murder rate of the 20 biggest cities in the country.

Milwaukee was always proud of how safe it was, and now we are kind of going the opposite way quickly. At least I believe one of the reasons is certain politicians. It has become politically expedient for them to trash the police departments, to, therefore, threaten individual police with lawsuits, resulting in police not engaging the population enough and resulting in a high number of murders.

I, therefore, call upon all of our politicians to boldly speak out in favor of the police and boldly describe to the population as a whole that we do not have a racist country, which is something else that should be pointed out.

In my own district, I talk to the Hmong, who came here not even knowing the language. If you talk to the Hmong, all of their children and their grandchildren are doing fantastically well, living the American Dream.

I know an increasing number of people from India in my district, another example of a group that frequently came to America, didn't know the native language, and now they are living the American Dream.

But for some reason--I personally believe they are trying to destroy America--politicians are out there talking about what a horrible, racist country they have.

I think they do it to divide America and weaken America, but I beg them to stop doing it that way and to win elections based on issues, not on name-calling and not on teaching our young people that we have a horrible, racist country.

Mr. Speaker, I guess for the benefit of all the people listening tonight, I yield back the balance of my time.

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