National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from Indiana for introducing this amendment.

I think it is a commonsense amendment. Right now, there are all sorts of rumors out there that when people are admitted to the service academies--who, after all, are going to wind up running our military, the one part of our government that cannot fail--preferences are being given and they are not always taking the best people that they can.

I want to point out something that is a little bit offensive about this whole diversity thing. Diversity for people like the Democratic Party, sadly, is solely determined by your genetics or your DNA or where your ancestors were 200 years ago.

I will give you an example to show the foolishness of it and that the real goal here, I think, is to divide Americans.

If I am one-quarter Peruvian, I can identify as Hispanic. I can identify as Hispanic despite the fact I have never spoken a word of Spanish and never been south of the border in my life. The people who just want to divide America would say that I have a unique perspective growing up in a Milwaukee suburb, despite the fact that I am one- quarter from a different part of the world.

This is preposterous on its face, and it will inevitably lead to division as we are educating our military that they should look at people by where their ancestors came from, not as individuals.

This true racism, which is what it absolutely is because that is how they determine which silo you fit into, has to be ripped away from our society and the military, in particular.

The idea that we have different viewpoints because of where our ancestors came from despite the fact that we have not been there and know nothing of them is preposterous.

Like I said, in addition to the divisiveness, you are going to wind up with people who are not necessarily the best people to lead our military. Anybody familiar with military history knows the important decisions that have to be made during wartime. We want those decisions made by the brightest people we have, not by people who have been picked based upon where their DNA was 2,000 years ago.

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