Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I had an interesting conversation today with someone who deals with people in the lower economic classes.

It was an interesting conversation because it was along the same theme that I often speak about behind this podium. That is the frustration she finds in the poor communities where the clergy again and again encourage young people to get married. The young people inform the clergy that they can't do it because the United States Government has established a bunch of programs that make it financially advantageous to not get married.

Indeed, it is not unusual to have $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000-a- year penalties for couples who get married, as opposed to situations in which a man is not in the household.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly encourage my colleagues in this Chamber to, over the next few months, undo the horrid disincentives toward forming families that were put in by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

Mr. Speaker, it is always enjoyable to speak to Bible Week and always enjoyable for Doug Lamborn to give me a couple of minutes.

National Bible Week, of course, begins every year on Thanksgiving and continues for the week after Thanksgiving.

One of the prior speakers, searching to say something unique about the Bible, talked about the number of books that have been printed. I would like to point out, since we are commanded under the Bible to share the Word of Christ and spread the Word of Christ around the world, the Bible, I believe, is the most translated book in the world. The Bible is right now translated into 3,700 different languages, which is a testament to the degree to which Christians are taking it to heart to spread the book throughout the world.

Now, the reason we have Bible Week in the United States is the Bible is more important than any other book in putting together our Constitution, putting together the laws we live under. There was a study done by something called the American Political Science Review in which they reviewed all the writings by our Founding Fathers: John Dickinson, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, the whole bunch. They found that the Bible was the most cited book of our forefathers.

That is not surprising. What I did find interesting is that one-third of the citations in the writings of our forefathers were from the Bible itself. I find this hard to believe, but in the article, they said the most cited book in the Bible was Deuteronomy. I would have guessed it was somewhere in the New Testament or Psalms. Even I will say that Deuteronomy is the most cited book in the Old Testament other than Psalms.

In any event, why was Deuteronomy so cited? I think Deuteronomy is so cited because Deuteronomy lays out the law that the Israelites were supposed to follow when Israel was founded. Our forefathers looked at Deuteronomy because they, as well, wanted us to form a country that God would bless and God would protect. That is why Deuteronomy was so cited.

This does not mean that they did not quote the New Testament. There are plenty of references from John, 1 Corinthians, from the other gospels that our forefathers mentioned because I think they felt it was of necessity to look at these quotations in learning how to live.

I should also point out that the Bible our forefathers read was largely from the English language. They lived at a time when we were having the American Revolution. America was being founded, and we read an English Bible. When the French Revolution was going on, it was somewhat the opposite of our country. The French revolutionaries were atheist. They were barbaric. They killed the nuns. They killed the priests. It was horrific. It was an interesting juxtaposition even at that time between what I guess today we would call maybe the communist element, the French, and what we have in America.

I should also give a couple of quotes from our forefathers showing how important they felt the Bible was. These quotes do not mean a political party. It means kind of an ideology or way to put together your country. John Adams said the Bible ``is the most republican book in the world.'' John Dickinson, who was the most important member of Delaware in our founding, said the Bible ``is the most republican book that was ever written.'' He even ups it one more.

You can see the degree to which our forefathers lived by the Bible. It is because they lived by the Bible and stuck by the Bible that we have become such a blessed country. We have to continue to follow the Bible if we kind of want to get back on the straight and narrow.

One more time, I thank Congressman Lamborn for giving me a few extra minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I will address the Biden administration's treatment of community rehabilitation providers. I think many people would be aware of them as a place for people with some disabilities, perhaps Down syndrome, whatever, to work because their abilities are a little less than a lot of other citizens.

In any event, in order to operate these places, they need 14(c) certificates to have people work for under minimum wage. They can afford to work for under minimum wage because they are getting other benefits such as SSI.

However, these facilities are very important to them. It gives them a purpose in life, a little bit of independence to earn their own paycheck, and a chance to socialize with so many other people they wouldn't otherwise.

I am going to introduce legislation shortly to make sure the Biden administration, on the way out the door, does not get rid of 14(c) certificates, which are necessary for these valuable citizens to work full time.

Mr. Speaker, obviously, we are about to begin a new session, and one more time I would like to review what I think are some of the major mistakes that this body has committed over the last 50 or 60 years that we should be revisiting now, now that it is apparent the American public wants some change.

It is a goal of this body, and really even a constitutional mandate, that we treat everybody equally and that we don't prefer one group of people or ethnic group of people over another group of people, people of one lifestyle over another lifestyle.

Nevertheless, one more time I think I have to bring up that it is very apparent that we are treating people differently and that is particularly with regard to people who elect to raise children in marriage and people who, for whatever reason, sometimes their fault sometimes not their fault, elect to raise children out of marriage.

Mr. Speaker, if you look at almost every single government program, they are conditioned or based upon percent of poverty. If you are below a certain income level, then you are eligible for that program, and if you are above a certain level, then you are not eligible for benefits under that plan.

Since in a household with a man and woman both there and both parents of a child, it is overwhelmingly likely that one of them is working full-time, they will be making $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 or more, that couple will almost never be considered to be in poverty.

Mr. Speaker, if you have another situation in which the mother and father are in different households, if one of these people is not working or working minimally, making maybe $15,000 or $16,000 a year or less and the other person is working full-time, then that is considered to be not in poverty.

As a result, financially, there is an incentive to make a household in which the mother and father are not both there the norm.

Now, almost all of the programs that began with the so-called war on poverty in the 1960s gave grants or money to people who did not have both a man and a woman in the household. Some of these programs at the time were known as food stamps, some were healthcare, what is known as Medicaid, or different States have different words for it. In Wisconsin we call it BadgerCare.

We have low-income housing which is, again, available only to people with low income. As a matter of fact, in a lot of these low-income housing projects one of the goals they have when they hire managers is to make sure that there is not a man in the household or a father in the household because then you shouldn't be able to take advantage of the program.

There used to be cash grants called AFDC which were eliminated during the Gingrich/Clinton years, and they, again, gave cash basically to people in situations where you did not have a mother and father at home. It has since been replaced by TANF grants.

If someone does decide to work 14, 15, or 20 hours a week there are grants for daycare that are not eligible for situations in which you have both parents at home. If you want to go to college, there are grants called Pell grants available, but not available to people in which you have both the mother and father at home.

This should concern us all. It is not difficult to come up with hypotheticals. Another program which kind of discourages full-time work is called the earned income tax credit program where a family can wind up with $5,000 or $6,000 that you won't get if you are making say more than $40,000 a year or married to somebody with a normal income.

We have to revisit this problem.

These programs have changed America such that in 1965 before these programs kicked in, only about 5 percent of children born in America were born to a family without a mother and father at home. That number is now over 40 percent.

Other programs have become more popular. Something I think we ought to remember is that it is not the cost that bothers me as much as it is what it is doing to America.

At the turn of the century, we had about 17 million people on FoodShare, what people call food stamps. That number is now 42,000. In other words, we have over doubled the number of people on food assistance. America is very generous. I tour my food banks all the time. They do a fantastic job. Mr. Speaker, I love those food banks.

America does have to cover people, but in order to get on food stamps, Mr. Speaker, you need a lower income, and I think we ought to be spending more time wondering why.

Right now, unemployment is almost nonexistent, but despite the fact that we have almost nonexistent unemployment, we skyrocketed up from 17 million to 42 million people on food stamps. So it is important.

I want to dig into these programs because some of these programs give people on the programs benefits that people not on the programs would not use.

Mr. Speaker, if you talk to your clerk in the local food store they will comment, if you ask them frequently, that people on the government benefit are buying things that the people behind the counter would not think of buying.

We have to ask ourselves: Is that right?

There is a housing program called section 42 which, in my opinion, does more to benefit property tax developers than it does to benefit the people living in the housing. There is a program in which because the government pays for 70 percent of the cost of the housing, the housing built for so-called low income is frequently nicer or more lavish.

If you look at the kitchen counters and if you look at where they build the properties, they are more lavish than the average American finds.

I had a staffer a little while ago who got married, and when she and her husband were looking for housing, they were disappointed to find that the nicest housing was all low income and they would not be able to afford such nice housing.

I talked to a property developer, and he found it difficult to buy new land for new apartment projects because he always got outbid by the developers who were having 70 percent of their projects paid for by the government.

I have got two problems there. One is the general marriage penalty associated with the programs and the other is whoever put the program in there and supports the program appears to me to be more concerned about making money for property developers than even the people who need the low-income housing.

I should point out that some low-income housing is going to be a necessity. We have people on Social Security whose incomes are so low that they can't even afford an apartment. I can understand the reason for this housing. Overall, the point is that we, right now, are operating a policy in this country and have been operating the policy for 50 years that says: We don't want both mom and dad in the home with the children.

George Gilder has written a lot about this problem. Robert Rector has written a lot about this problem.

There is no question that one of the reasons we have gone from 5 percent of the children born without a mother and father at home to now over 40 percent is that the problem is the government is encouraging this.

Mr. Speaker, I want to point out, you may say, well, that is sure surprising. This is not something that we wanted.

However, there are a lot of people who actually view the American nuclear family as a problem. Karl Marx, which seems kind of strange, 170 years ago felt a goal of the hard left, the progressive left, whatever you want to call it, was to abolish the family.

There are names that maybe are forgotten, but in the sixties, we had the radical feminists like Kate Millet, who was a well-known person, talked about destroying the American family. She, for whatever philosophical reason, didn't want men in the household. So there are people who want this.

Two of the three people who founded Black Lives Matter called for ending the so-called Western prescribed nuclear family structure. There is no question that about 5 years ago around here Black Lives Matter was perceived to be a very powerful institution, and a lot of people spoke about it positively. So it is important to remember they wanted to get rid of the nuclear family.

How are we going to get back to where we used to be, where almost all children had a mother and father at home unless there would have been some catastrophe and one of the parents would have died?

I think that is something that we should be looking at unquestionably over the next 3 months.

This is a totally artificial thing. When I talk to people in other countries, such as Korea and India, it is almost unheard of all of this not having the father in the home.

Why did it happen in the Western countries and the United States? No question, I think the reason is government policy has encouraged it.

I hope that, in the next 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 months, as we look at government programs, we have as our goal not discriminating in favor of families that don't have a mother and father at home and, even more importantly, stop discriminating against and displaying hatred and inequity against families in which both mother and father are at home.

One other anecdote of a program, Pell grants, which I mention just briefly. I have been talking about this, even before I got here, for 25 years of my life, and once I talked to a young gal who must have been 23 or 24 about the marriage penalties associated with college scholarships, what she thought about this.

She said she and her husband got married before they were having children, but none of her friends were getting married because they got free college. In other words, they wanted to have the government pay for their college, and they realized that whoever puts together this Food Stamp program had, whether it was intentionally or unintentionally, put together one more program in which you were discriminated against if you were married and actually were discriminated against if your parents were married.

It is another problematic situation here, and I hope that the American public and conservatives around this

Capitol and throughout the country demand a situation in which we stop discriminating against the old-fashioned nuclear family.

I think that is the most important problem facing America and the next Congress. It is a difficult issue to deal with because you don't want to be labeled mean or cruel. On the other hand, as a public policy, I think coming up on 60 years, maybe 55 years, brazenly discriminating against a nuclear family with a mother and father at home has to end.

We should stop treating the mother-and-father family at home so poorly. We should stop penalizing them by keeping the newer apartments off the market for them. It is not right that they can't afford things in the food store that maybe people with potentially lower income are.

As far as health insurance is concerned, we discriminate against middle-class America. They frequently have big, $15,000 to $20,000, deductions on their healthcare, deductions that we would not give to somebody who, under normal circumstances, does not have both parents in the home. This is another example of discrimination and another example of policy in which we try to destroy the American family.

I think the first step here is to have more and more people talk about it. I think the American people should be aware of it. The American people should not be supportive of any program that so brazenly discourages having a mother and father at home. I realize it can happen.

I will finish with this. When this was first brought to my attention, there was a great author by the name of George Gilder, who wrote books about this family situation in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and he actually studied what was known as the ghetto at the time in Albany, New York.

He followed around a young couple, a man and a woman, after the young woman got pregnant, was going to become a mother.

George Gilder was probably born around 1940. He felt at the time that that would be cause for concern and alarm, that the young woman was pregnant. In fact, he found out that, at that time in Albany, New York, it was not considered a bad thing, but it was considered a good thing because now they would be eligible for food and eligible for medical care and finally be able to get out from under their parents. They were given their own apartment.

By the way, I find that in my district, too. When I talk to people administering the low-income housing, it is not unusual that people get into low-income housing because they are leaving their parents' house, which a lot of young people want to do, but I guess one way to get your own apartment is to have a child. I am not sure that is a good thing.

In any event, George Gilder, looking at things, found a certain subset of society that felt it was monetarily beneficial to have a child without the father legally around. As a result, we were probably shifting society away from and discriminating against the mother and father at home.

George Gilder made another observation as he studied this class of people. Traditionally, in our society, the purpose of the father has been to support the family, and George Gilder found that, frequently, fathers' income went up and responsibility level went up as he got married and had children and assumed the role of being the breadwinner and responsible for paying the mortgage, that sort of thing.

As we got away from having the father in the home, they lose that motivation or that purpose in life. As they lose that purpose in life, they are more likely to do drugs and more likely to not be as productive citizens. In other words, the dad becomes more productive after he gets married, not before he gets married.

Not only is this, I think, the current policy, a problem for children, but I think it is a big problem for men, as well. It is something that isn't talked about nearly as much as it should be, but sometimes people wonder why there is such a higher percentage of men incarcerated than women, a higher percentage of men dying of drug overdoses compared to women. I think part of it is because it has been the policy of the Federal Government to chase men out of the household.

In any event, I leave my conservative friends around the country with this desire: over the next couple of months or 3 or 4 months, we talk about the perverse incentives and the apparent hatred of the American government for households with a man and woman both available to raise the children, and we work toward an equitable government in which we at least treat the two-parent family equally in the eyes of the government, as we do families in which both parents are not available.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers), my good friend.

Honoring Neil Middleton for His Distinguished Service

Madam Speaker, it has been almost 2 months since Congress has reconvened. Certainly, a lot of things have taken place back home, things in the news that are a little bit shocking and ought to be commented on.

The first thing I would like to point out--and we saw this again in the first week back--a prominent Member of this Congress spoke about the need to protect democracy. Again and again, people from both sides of the aisle, but disproportionately from the Democrat side of the aisle, talk about the necessity of protecting democracy and refer to our country's democracy.

I remember hearing this for the first time when I was at Marquette University, one of the largest universities in the State of Wisconsin. A professor of government or history or something like that referred to our country as a democracy.

When we recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day, they might want to ponder that we talk about the Republic, the Republic for which it stands. We don't talk about the democracy for which it stands. People might wonder why politicians like to refer to our form of government as a democracy but in the Pledge of Allegiance we refer it to as a Republic.

At the time our Constitution was drafted, Ben Franklin talked about giving us a Republic if we can keep it. In other words, he didn't say a democracy if we can keep it. He said a Republic if we can keep it.

You might wonder whether our forefathers ever mentioned democracy. Of course, they did. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote: ``Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.''

In other words, James Madison did talk about democracy, and he talked about it negatively.

Why don't politicians like to talk about our country being a Republic and prefer to talk about it as a democracy or a representative democracy?

It is because in democracy the government is determined by the people collectively or the majority of the people. In a Republic, we turn to our Constitution.

There may, at any given time, be a majority of people in this body or a majority of people in this country who don't like a given religion, or they feel like we can confiscate people's property, or because there has been a shooting on the news the night before, they want to ignore the Second Amendment. Therefore, they might not like certain religions and want to suppress that religion. They might not like certain ideas, and they want to say that they were elected here, so they can suppress those ideas.

There are two examples I would like to share with this body. There was a bill called the McCain-Feingold Act that was passed by two popular Congressmen around the year 2000. They wanted to restrict what people could say or how much time people could buy in an election. In other words, they wanted to restrict the freedom of speech. I am sure both politicians at that time felt we are very popular. We have been elected several times. We have the right to trample on somebody's free speech.

Certainly, in an election season, I would like there to be less or would prefer there to be less advertisements, less mailing going on.

The McCain-Feingold Act passed. The Supreme Court at the time had to lecture, in essence, Senator Feingold and Senator McCain that we do not live in a democracy. We don't care if you receive 60 or 65 percent of the vote in your district. You do not have the right to say certain people cannot buy time on television or send out mailings.

Another example, there was a very popular Governor in the State of Wisconsin. I think very highly of the man. He wanted to say if you have property along a State highway, we can restrict what you can do on that property because someday we might want to buy that property when this highway goes from a two-lane to a four-lane highway. Therefore, we will make your front 50 feet or 60 feet along the highway less valuable because, after all, we represent the government. We have been elected overwhelmingly. The implication is this is a democracy, and we can take your property from you.

Again, the State Supreme Court had to say that, hey, wait a minute. We don't have a democracy here. We have a Republic. We don't care how popular you are. You cannot interfere with what people can do with their land along a highway.

It is another example in which politicians wished we had a democracy or a representative democracy so they can tell you what you can do with your property. In fact, our Constitution stood tall and said that we don't care how you were elected or how many people voted for you, we will not allow you to take people's property.

I believe that is why politicians like to talk about democracy. Because they received 70 percent or 51 percent around here, they like to believe they can determine what you can and cannot say.

As we continue throughout this biennium, let us try not to refer to our form of government as a democracy. Let's refer to it as James Madison or Ben Franklin would have liked to have us refer to it. What they gave us was a republic under our wonderful, great Constitution.

Even though our Constitution allows people to say things we might disagree with, even though our Constitution allows us to quote our wonderful Holy Bible, even though our Constitution prevents the government from taking

people's property without the Constitution, even though our Constitution allows the carrying or owning of firearms, when a lot of people around here don't think we should have the right to carry those firearms, let us stand with our Republic and, bravely, just like when we say the Pledge of Allegiance, bravely describe our country as a Republic, not a democracy.

Again, James Madison said, democracies are spectacles of turbulence and contention; have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been short in their lives.

Now, I think during the past month or whatever it was we were not in Washington, a couple of prominent Americans took aim at our Constitution. In particular, they didn't like the First Amendment. They didn't like that people were out there, saying things that they disagreed with.

These former politicians both almost became the President of the United States, which shows how precarious our hold on our great Republic is.

I am talking, in part, about Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady but, even worse, former Secretary of State, who almost became President of the United States. She talked about social media companies and said they must moderate content on their platforms or we will lose total control.

In other words, Hillary Clinton felt that the government should control our lives and they didn't like social media companies allowing things to seep out into the zeitgeist. Maybe those things were hostile to what Hillary felt. It is kind of hard to believe she almost became President. She should always be remembered as someone who believed the First Amendment caused the government to lose control.

While we were out on recess, John Kerry, another man who almost became President of the United States, called the First Amendment a major block in combating misinformation and fighting climate control.

Of course, there is a disagreement with regard to climate change, where it comes from, if it is happening, but John Kerry felt the way to deal with this issue was apparently to deal with the First Amendment.

What he was doing here was talking to the World Economic Forum in a panel on green energy. John Kerry was not only trying to trample on the First Amendment rights of Americans; he wanted this idea to spread throughout the world.

Can you imagine if he had ever become President of the United States, a man who called the First Amendment a major block? My goodness. This is what is going on, and the American public has to wake up.

During this time, there was also a letter made public by Mark Zuckerberg, one of the wealthiest men in America. You would think the wealthiest people in America above all would have the freedom to exercise their First Amendment rights. Apparently not.

The Biden administration weighed in with Mark Zuckerberg. They didn't like it that people out there had different opinions about COVID, how to address it, and what was appropriate. The Biden administration apparently contacted Mark Zuckerberg and his group, saying that maybe there were things that the American public should know. In other words, rather than having a free exchange of ideas on the value of the vaccine or the value of social distancing or whatever, we shouldn't have an open exchange of ideas. It would be better if we didn't have that pesky First Amendment. It would be better if the people who know best-- Anthony Fauci or Pfizer, say--that we should just defer to them because we all know how important Pfizer is. They certainly give a lot of campaign contributions, which we politicians like. Therefore, we should weigh in on the social media platforms and say there are some things that are inconvenient to the country.

I hope when we return we do something to put a little more energy in that First Amendment and, above all, educate the American public that there are politicians out there--like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, or, apparently, Joe Biden--who view the First Amendment as an obstacle in their expansion of government.

I think this has, to a certain extent, been commented on, but not commented on enough because too many important people--and here we are talking about one President and two almost Presidents--wanted to end people's First Amendment rights.

The First Amendment is only one of the things that make America so great. Others are, I think, things referred to by Nikita Khrushchev and other Communists who, at the time, wanted governments the exact opposite of what we have.

We have a free country based on a republic and our Constitution and anticipated to be a country for moral and religious people. Under communism, we had a country aiming for atheism and totalitarianism in which a government elite decides who we can work for, what goods are to be produced, and the degree to which we penalize people who say things that are not appropriately in line with what the government wants.

In any event, Nikita Khrushchev--in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union was kind of the center of communism--promised to someday take over the United States. They would take over the United States without firing a shot.

We spend a great deal around here on munitions, submarines, tanks, and airplanes, but it was interesting that at one time the Communists-- and I think Nikita Khrushchev was speaking for the Communists--felt they would take over this country without firing a shot.

What evidence is there that they are trying to weaken our country? I think in addition to the fact that they want to chip away at the First Amendment, I think there is hostility to families, old-fashioned nuclear families, going on in this country. How are we trying to chip away at the families? After all, people like Karl Marx did not like the family.

One way to look at it is that there are currently over 90 programs in the United States in which the benefits of those programs depend on something referred to as percent of poverty. A percent of poverty calculation penalizes two-parent families, or at least it penalizes two-parent families if at least one of them is working a full-time job. In other words, it encourages one-parent families.

I, and probably most of the people in this institution, were around in 1965. Back at that time, only 5 percent of the children born in this country were born into families who did not have both a mother and father at home.

Over time, we have built up over 90 programs in which it was difficult for this family to form. In other words, you get more money right away if you have a family in which only one parent was there. We have worked our way up to a situation where the child is born without both parents at home in over 40 percent of families. Normally, this means it is a fatherless family.

In other words, the government, which is supposed to treat everybody equally, if you have a scale out there, it is overwhelmingly trying to create an America in which the old-fashioned family is becoming more obsolete.

I should point out that this has gone, like I said, from 5 percent to 40 percent. Programs that these families are eligible for are things like SNAP or the Food Stamp program, the low-income housing program, the earned income tax program, the Medicaid healthcare program, things like the Pell Grant Program, TANF program cash assistance, SSI disability program for the children all are inducements not to form an old-fashioned family.

Every biennium--last time, Joe Biden's final budget request--the government usually puts new programs on the heap or adds money to old programs to make the gap between somebody who decides to have both parents in the house compared to somebody who has only one parent in the house.

One person who has written very eloquently on this hasn't been listened to as much as he should--Robert Rector is one--is George Gilder, who wrote a bestseller in 1980. I know there was anticipation that Ronald Reagan would act on this book. He was not able to act on it--my guess is primarily because the Republican House was always in the minority at that time.

George Gilder used to look at what normally I refer to as slums or low-income areas of the city. He focused on Albany, New York, and he followed around a young couple where the young lady was pregnant.

To his surprise, it was not cause for concern like it has been throughout all of history when a young girl gets pregnant and isn't married. Rather, it was a cause for celebration, as the gleeful new couple went around from the low-income housing people to the food stamp people, to the Medicaid people, and signed up for all sorts of benefits. At the time, they had something called AFDC cash payments. It was a cause for celebration because now the young lady would not have to live with her parents anymore. She was getting her own place.

I am sure the people who devised these programs were primarily a money-oriented group, and they felt that this new program would be more likely to have the young lady live on her own without having to live with her mother or with her parents, so they felt they were doing something good.

I think, over time, given the hostility of Karl Marx, given the hostility to the radicals even in the 1960s and 1970s, there were people who knew exactly what they were doing as they destroyed the nuclear family in parts of America.

In any event, this is something we have to look at. When you combine Federal programs with State programs, which frequently team up with Federal programs, you can have situations in which there are $20,000, $30,000, $35,000 penalties for people who decide to get married rather than have people live with a single mother.

It is not like single mothers cannot be very good parents. It is not hard to find people who have been raised in single-parent families who are wonderful children. On the other hand, it is tougher. Statistics would show that it is tougher.

In America, where we try to keep everybody equal, we should not continue to have programs which kind of push more and more people into that single-family situation.

I saw George Gilder weighing in on a topic just the other day. Like I said, he wrote a great bestseller called ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980, and he is still around. He made the case that not only is this bad for the children, but it is bad for the men because you create swaths of society in which men have no purpose because, traditionally, the purpose in an old-fashioned nuclear family is to be the breadwinner.

Here, we have a situation in which he is not going to be able to make enough money, in many cases, to match the government. As a result, we have a situation in which the mother marries the government rather than the husband, and in the long run, it hurts the husband as well.

I hope that this Congress, with such high hopes, works to take away this marriage penalty. Regardless of what Karl Marx would have said, regardless of what certain radical groups would say, we do not want to penalize the father for becoming part of that household.

We know these people are still around. I mentioned, again, Black Lives Matter, a group which many people in this institution were not afraid to stand with, coming out against the traditional nuclear family. It didn't cause people to run away from that group.

There are other quotes of radicals, Angela Davis, that crowd, over the last 50 years, which, again, are hostile to the nuclear family, making fun of the nuclear family, a preference for single parenthood.

I hope this Congress begins to chip away at that ideal. We do not want to any longer have people penalized for getting married and trying to form a traditional family. Indeed, we ought to be encouraging that.

It didn't work out as well as people wanted, but the next attack on freedoms that I think our forefathers would not have seen is congressional programs or programs created by Congress or the executive branch trying to treat people differently by sex or race. These are sometimes referred to as affirmative action programs, but there are many other ways to refer to the programs.

The idea is that the government ought to aim programs at certain subgroups of society, that we have to weigh in to have a disproportionate number of women in a program compared to the women who want to be in the program, a disproportionate number by ancestry. Be it Asian American, African American, so-called Hispanic American, Pacific Islander, or North African, the government should be favoring people by the group that they are from.

This is another thing our forefathers would have been opposed to. They wanted to treat all Americans equally. They did not want the government to have our elections become a contest between ethnic groups. They did not want our government programs to be a contest between men and women as the government weighs in, as they do today, on who owns companies that get government contracts.

If you get a government contract, the government wants to know which ethnic group you are. Of course, you self-identify, so because you are one-quarter Hispanic or one-quarter Native American, you should get preferences to a program. Of course, they don't care here on amount of wealth, so you are going to have a situation in which, say, an Asian American worth tens of millions of dollars gets preference on a government contract compared to a poor person of European descent, a poor guy.

The problem is not just the preferences, which are unfair in its own right, it does result--soon, we are going to have a bill around here--a lot more the government-at-large has to take care of with the problems caused by the hurricanes. That just results in additional cost, maybe quality, but certainly cost, depending upon who gets the project, but it creates animosity.

It creates an America in which people do not say: I want to have the best person for this program. Every government program, every government hiring decision becomes a contest between men and women, or a contest between Hispanic or Asian or what have you. It is a kind of ridiculous contest because America is so nonracist in the first place, but that is what we have going on in the program.

We have got to save some money by getting rid of these bureaucrats. We ought to realize that the purpose of these programs is to divide America.

There is a book out--I don't know if it is okay to use a picture of a book here--but it is called, ``America's Cultural Revolution,'' by Christopher Rufo. In this book, he points out that this idea of breaking apart America by racial groups would be a way to destroy America.

There was a Communist by the name of Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse, who was very powerful in the late sixties and early seventies.

At that time, the Communist element, the Progressive element, has always wanted to fundamentally change America. They were hoping to change America by dividing America by wealth, and they wanted Americans to be bitter and angry because some people lived in a nice house or had a big bank account. They felt they could rile people up and make them mad and bring out their worst emotions and create a revolution in America.

They failed. In the late sixties and early seventies, there were a lot of bombings, there were a lot of riots, but America was still a country at heart that was proud to be American. They realized anybody in America could realize the American Dream if they were willing to work hard.

The Progressives failed in the late sixties and early seventies to divide America by bitterness, by economic divide. As a fallback position, they felt that maybe we can divide America by race, maybe we can create bitterness and anger if we persuade people America is a horrible racist country.

That is what they talk about in ``America's Cultural Revolution,'' the desire to destroy America because we want most Americans bitter and angry and thinking that we have a racist country.

We have to get rid of the people who are pushing this division, whether they are an American business, in academia, in government, a lot of times they are referred to as DEI specialists.

The purpose of these people is to divide America and tell people America is a horrible, racist country. It is on its face, by the way, absurd.

I mean, the wealthiest subgroup in America today is Indian Americans. They do not look European in nature. Many of them come here not knowing

how to speak English. Most of them who come here are not Christian. If the people are right that America is a horrible, racist country, that they discriminate against people, these people would not be able to rise to the level they have.

If you look at the other wealthiest Americans, almost none of them are White and of European descent: Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Cuban Americans, second-generation African Americans all outperform native persons.

Nevertheless, this evil group of DEI people who administer these programs use their positions to try to create resentment in America. It should be a goal to cause Herbert Marcuse's successors to fail. We have got to do all we can to get rid of these DEI specialists who encourage hate, encourage racism, encourage resentment, spread a myth that we have a big white supremacist problem.

There is no way, when we get down with the next level of appropriation bills that this government--which is broke out of its mind--ought to still have any bureaucrats who make this pitch throughout America.

Of course, during the campaign, you will notice--some Republicans fall guilty of this as well--there are campaign promises aimed at individual ethnic groups rather than treating all Americans as one. This is not something we had to do 20 or 30 years ago. It is obvious that Herbert Marcuse Communists or radical socialists have achieved his goal in that at least one political party plans to maintain power by putting programs out there that benefit one ethnic group over another ethnic group or promises financial benefits if you belong to one group over another group.

Fortunately, so far, they haven't had a huge amount of success, but if you talk around, they have made some progress in persuading some people that we have a huge problem in society.

In any event, certainly an immediate goal for this institution is to get rid of anybody preaching that DEI nonsense, certainly anybody whose position in our government is to encourage their horrible philosophy.

In any event, there are some comments on what is going on in America. Just to summarize again, I think we have to provide a little bit more oomph behind our First Amendment so that people like Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or Joseph Biden are pushed to the dustbin of history if they decide to attack it or feel that is part of our problem.

I think we have to be very careful to not discourage the formation of two-parent families like we have in the last 60 years.

I think we have to get rid of the bureaucracy, which is growing up, which tries to divide America by ethnic background, is something else that I think has to be done.

We have to educate our young people that we do not have a democracy. James Madison and our forefathers would be shocked and stunned and disappointed if this land, which they had founded, had twisted itself all around, abandoned our respect for our Constitution, the Republic, and instead was teaching our young ones that we had a democracy, including some of the people with the greatest positions up here.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, it is great to be back on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. We wrapped up our election season last Tuesday. I participated in debates. Other people participated in debates.

We are all ready to go after that inflation, that inflation driving up food costs, driving up housing costs, driving up the cost of gasoline. We are ready to get back here and be a little responsible.

Mr. Speaker, what is the first bill up, the first bill on the first day? It is a bill that is going to cost just short of $200 billion, not cut $200 billion, as we try to strengthen the dollar. It is going to cost $200 billion.

It is illuminating that the most cosponsored bill is a bill that will add another $200 billion to the country's debt, but that is the situation that we are in.

Mr. Speaker, let's forget about the flowery language here. Now is the first opportunity to say no to spending. I was anticipating this biennium. We fight over bills worth $500 million or $1 billion. Now, we have a bill before us for $190 billion, and everyone says it is time to, in a bipartisan way, spend more. The average American is already $100,000 in debt.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to please remember the promises about excessive spending that we were all saying just 2 weeks ago and please vote against this bill.

I don't know what is going to happen to me if the first thing the Republicans do after coming back after this election season is pass a bill that is going to cost $200 billion. Remember, the current system is built to provide a benefit for the low earner. These folks already have a pension and knew what the situation was going to be. Please don't spend $200 billion.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Wisconsin, the Honorable Tony Wied, be permitted to take the oath of office today.

His certificate of election has not arrived, but there is no contest and no question has been raised with regard to his election.

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the newest member of the Wisconsin delegation, Tony Wied, on being sworn in this evening.

Tony joins our delegation with an impressive three-decade career of starting, building, and running three retail outlets in northeast Wisconsin, including Dino Stop locations in Green Bay, Ledgeview, Manitowoc, New Franken, Little Suamico, and Abrams.

Through his years in business, Tony has learned a lot about the value of hard work, strong customer service, and uniting people around a common mission.

Tony has employed hundreds of Wisconsinites over the years and now brings that same commonsense business acumen to this body, where it is greatly needed. We need more people dealing with the common sense that requires you to be a small businessman, and he is going to help the everyday Americans pursue the American Dream.

Mr. Speaker, once again, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Tony; his wife, Angela; and his four sons: Charlie, Frank, George, and Simon on this momentous occasion.

I certainly had a chance to see his four sons on the campaign trail. They are like a whirlwind across northeastern Wisconsin.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Wied).

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

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. 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.

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

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.