Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Women Veterans Recognition Day

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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.

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