Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I point out that every month in this country, if you include the people who come over here kind of administratively, we hit new records of people who I think are here illegally. That is not going down if you compare month after month.

In any event, currently the Biden administration is encouraging our embassies abroad to fly the so-called pride flag on our embassies, including the Vatican. This is completely inappropriate, and the Biden administration should immediately stop this policy.

America is a blessed Nation that has, I think, been the light of the world. Rather than sending a message to the world that America stands for and is great because of its freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution and the bravery, faith, purity, and respect for the law of its people, it sends the message that America stands for the LGBT sexual agenda.

Leaving aside the absurdity that any sexually related flag should stand with Old Glory--how ridiculous--this is not the message we want to send to the countries around the world. It is also an insult to the hundreds of millions of Americans who oppose this agenda as well as the hundreds of thousands who made our country great and would be appalled by this.

President Biden, please take down this flag.

Mr. Chair, I missed roll call 278--I used an old card. Had I been present, I would have voted ``NO'' on rollcall No. 278.

Amendment No. 2 Offered by Mr. Molinaro

Mr. Speaker, before talking about the main event of three issues, it occurs to me it has been a while since we really have addressed what should be the end to the Ukraine-Russian war.

In the past I have expressed frustration, and I still have this frustration as to why the Biden administration is not trying to work towards an end to the war? Eventually every war ends. The longer the war drags on, the worst it is for all involved.

Ukraine has the second lowest birth rate in the world. It is a tragedy for any country to lose its young people, but particularly for a country that has so few young people in the first place. Likewise, Russia has a low birth rate, and they also have a high emigration rate, in which people are coming to this country. I ran into one in my district.

Mr. Speaker, I know from spending time in the San Diego sector along the Mexican border, a lot of Russians have come across there. So you have two countries with a shortage of young people, and they are dying in a war. For humanitarian reasons we ought to end that war.

Furthermore, the war is very costly. Buildings are being damaged in Ukraine to a huge extent, and geopolitically, the Biden policy of letting this war drag on without sticking their nose in there at all for well over a year now drives China and Russia together.

It wasn't that long ago that we had over 1,000 McDonald's in Russia. I recently toured a factory in my district. They owned a similar factory in Russia which they had to sell off. What I took from that, there was a time in the relatively recent past when the United States and Russia had very good relations, the United States and Ukraine had very good relations, and I don't know why we couldn't get back there if this war ended quickly. It seems when you talk to the Biden people they don't care if it goes on for years.

Again, I make a plea to the Biden administration: See if you can look into doing what you can do to end that war.

Now we will look at three issues that I think all have the potential to destroy the country, and I think we need some clear thinking on all three.

First of all, let's look at the border. There has been a change in the way some people are entering the country. They are able to sign on to get entry to the United States, an app apparently, if they are coming in from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It is because more people are coming in that way that it makes it more difficult to see how many people are coming in each month, and because it is now in two different places, we begin to lose track of the number of people coming into this country compared to where we were historically.

Let's look at, for example, where we were in May. In the most recent May, 227,000 people came across the border as what we refer to as illegally; a year ago it was 166,000; 2 years ago it was 74,000; and 3 years ago, under President Trump, it was 6,000. We have gone from 6,000 a month crossing in May three years ago to 227,000 crossing in this past May.

It is kind of a dramatic increase and something that should remain on the front page of our newspapers every day until this crisis abates.

Mr. Speaker, it is the same thing if you look at April. Now that we have the other numbers, in April most recently 211,000 people crossing the border; a year ago 187,000; 2 years ago 66,000; and 3 years ago under 6,000.

Again, we have gone from under 6,000 to 211,000. A dramatic increase in the number of people crossing the border. This is not a problem we can't deal with because we have to be bipartisan. It is always nice to be bipartisan, but this problem was solved 3 years ago, and now we have gone up by a factor of over 30.

As we have an increasing number of people crossing the border, we also have more unaccompanied minors crossing the border. People ought to be especially concerned when people who are 13 or 14 years old are crossing the border without parents or even say an aunt or an uncle. Now we are having about 6,000 to 8,000 unaccompanied minors crossing every month. Under the prior administration it was 500 to 1,000. There are a lot more young people.

There was a time when people on the other side of the aisle would be concerned about people crossing the border separately from their families. That was people who were separated for maybe 2 weeks because their parents had broken the law. Now we have 6,000 to 8,000 people every month being separated from their parents.

Who knows if they will ever see them again?

For minors, the lack of concern is stunning.

Recently there was an article in The New York Times that I think the administration to a degree has disavowed, but no matter whose numbers you look at, Mr. Speaker, the administration has lost track of tens of thousands of minors. They don't know where they are after they gave them to people to take care of them. We have lost track of tens of thousands of kids.

Particularly, we have a crisis in this country of human trafficking and sex trafficking that should be of particular concern to the administration. It should be of particular concern because people rarely come over here without the Mexican drug cartels signing off. We can only imagine that when these young kids work, sometimes third shifts in factories illegally, that they were sending money not only back home but to the drug cartels as well.

I talked to the Acting Labor Secretary about what she should do if minors who are coming are found crossing illegally or if minors are found working illegally. She refused to say how often they contact the parents. Which, again, I thought was horrible. If you were an inspector of a factory, Mr. Speaker, and found 15-year-old immigrants working there who shouldn't, wouldn't the first thing you would do would be to contact the parents?

Obviously.

The Biden administration doesn't do that. The Secretary of Labor will not be drawn into even commenting that we ever contact the parents of young people who are found here. We should always try to unite children with their parents.

Quite frankly, I even feel at the border if children come across with one parent that we should hold them up and look for the other parent. In the United States if parents are dealing with a divorce situation, in an effort to keep that family together, they sometimes try and say that one parent cannot move to another part of the country because we want both parents to participate in raising the children. I don't know why we don't do the same thing at our southern border.

On the flip side of letting everyone in, we are also taking our eye off of criminals who are not kicked out. Without a lot of hoopla in the newspapers, the Biden administration in their budget guesses that for the next 2 years we can anticipate about 29,000 people being deported. I think they might have computed it in a different way, but in his final 2 years under Barack Obama, we deported about 460,000 people. In one 2-year period under Obama, 460,000 were deported. Under President Biden, we have only 29,000 who were deported in a 2-year period. It is just like saying that we absolutely don't care what is going on here.

Of course, many deportations are caused by people here who are breaking

the law. People who are for open borders at least say: They are all such wonderful people. They are all so hardworking. What an asset to America.

The Biden administration is doing a pretty pathetic job even compared to his predecessors, including President Obama. He is doing a bad job of deporting people who break the law.

Of course, along with being soft on the border and letting everybody across, it inevitably means more people are bringing drugs across the border. In this country right now we have about 108,000 people every year dying of illegal drug overdoses. That is a crisis that America is not paying careful enough attention to.

As I have pointed before, we have about 57,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam war over 12 years. I am old enough to remember the Vietnam war. There were articles all the time about American troops dying. People were protesting about how many Americans were dying, and 57,000 people died in 12 years. It was a true tragedy.

We now have 108,000 Americans dying every year from illegal drug overdoses in this country largely because illegal drugs are flying across the southern border. Virtually nothing is being done in this budget to tighten up the border. Nothing is being done to prevent more people from coming here. The inevitable result is a further change in America as the people who come here may not have the traditional American values that we need to keep our Republic going. Not to mention, we will have people coming here who are taking advantage of our generous welfare system and people coming who are breaking the law and are not going to be deported.

That is the first issue that I feel that we really have to address.

The second horrible policy concerns the bizarre demands of this new transgender lobby. This past week I had quite an experience. I met with an 18-year-old who had doctors prescribe from 12 years old on testosterone and puberty blockers. At age 15, the wonderful medical establishment in our United States of America--I think primarily from the psychiatry wing of the medical establishment--decided to remove her breasts at age 15.

I don't care if someone went to medical school. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows people change dramatically between when they are 15, 20, 30, and 40 years of age. The idea that we have people going to medical school--I guess that is why they talk about people with book smarts and common sense. Nobody with common sense, unless they are absolutely obsessed with greed and just will do anything to make money in a surgery would possibly remove the breasts of a 15-year-old girl. They are doing it at two hospitals in Wisconsin which is horrible. This gal happened to have it done in California. Now this poor woman wants to undo the damage, and she can't.

In Europe they are finding that puberty blockers may affect bones and brain health. Sweden found that 10 years after reassignment surgery the suicide rate was 20 times that of their peers.

Is that even really a surprise?

I could almost guess it on my own without reading the study.

That is what they are finding in Europe, which went down this path before this. In European countries, even their liberal, let's worship the doctor societies know that they made a mistake.

I think someone has to look at the psychiatric industry and give them some more supervision because they are doing horrible things that anybody with any common sense would know.

The other thing the Europeans found is something we should realize in this country, too. This is a much bigger problem than when I was a child, and nobody ever seemed to know about it. How is that possible? Well, it is possible because the more they talk about it in the press, the more they talk about it in the entertainment medium, the more self- righteous politicians talk about it, the more young people begin to play in their mind with the idea that maybe if they are a boy, they should be a girl, and maybe if they are a girl, they should be a boy.

This is what happened to the poor gal I met with. She was 10 or 11 years old, 12 years old. She was unhappy. Given all that is out there on the internet, she thought, well, maybe I am unhappy because I should be a boy, which is perfectly understandable if you are inundated with this option on television and the computer constantly.

This is what we have. We have a gender dysphoria crisis, and the crisis has been caused by all these doctors claiming it is a common thing. The more kids hear about other people going through it--they may read articles about it, as this gal did, or read about it on the internet. It sounds interesting. ``There are these experts saying I am unhappy because maybe I want to be a boy.'' That is what happens.

I hope the press is a little bit more responsible in the future about pushing this as an everyday thing. When the press begins to push it, when it gets out there on computer screens, people begin to read it and begin to say maybe it is them.

There are at least two Congressmen out there with great bills on this, one from Georgia and one from California. I hope we see these bills on the floor of the Congress here in the very near future.

My one criticism of the bills is they only ban this type of risky surgery under age 18. I don't know why we don't try to knock that up a little bit higher.

I know in this country, as a practical matter, we bar the sale of beer until age 21. I think this surgery seems a little bit crazy even for a 30-year-old.

I hope we see these bills on the floor soon. I hope before they get to the floor, the authors make an adjustment to the bills and knock up the age to at least age 21.

One other comment I learned reading about this situation and talking to someone who went through it is that part of the problem is we have these well-meaning, progressive people who egg on these people. They get on their Facebook page or whatever. They tell people who they don't even know how proud they are of them for doing these surgeries, how happy they should be now that they did these surgeries.

By popular culture acting as cheerleaders for these surgeries, what do you think you get? A bunch of young, unhappy people who want to be happier.

Every time someone sends you an email, sends you whatever comments, ``You are so brave, and I am so happy for you,'' you are encouraging these people to get these horrific surgeries.

A lot of the blame, I think, goes on the people who are not familiar with this, not familiar with the study showing a dramatic increase in suicides, not to mention people without any common sense. They egg these poor boys and girls on to get these surgeries.

I beg people who consider encouraging these people or flattering these people for what they are doing to please stop it. Familiarize yourself with the information and stop to think that by flattering and encouraging these people, you may be the one responsible for making these life-changing decisions.

I will wind up by saying I think we need more people looking at the qualifications of some of these psychiatrists who push this and why this whole profession has allowed this to careen out of control. I think we have to look at the role that profession is playing in our society.

I will blame President Biden a little for this. His administration is all-in on this transgender, sexual confusion agenda, which is leading so many people to be unhappy.

The fourth area that I would like to address tonight, I don't like to address it. I really don't like to address it because it is such an awkward area, but it has to be addressed because the President of the United States is obsessed with it, so I have to address it.

The final issue is the issue of racism. It is Joe Biden's favorite issue, as far as I can tell. Joe Biden talked about racism four times in his inaugural speech and white supremacy once.

He keeps bringing it up in his State of the Union speeches. Again this year, he inferred that policemen are racist, and we have to warn particularly little Black children about racist police.

The studies don't show it. The studies show, adjusted for crimes committed, if anything, it is the other way around.

Joe Biden, a White guy--I wonder what other people think of him-- keeps getting up there and saying how racist

we all are, that we have a racism problem with police. Like I said, the studies show that that is not true.

What you can do, and I think people like Joe Biden have done, is intimidate the police into being afraid to act because they are in fear of being charged with racism. That is what you can do. You can make the police timid.

Of course, ever since we had this massive antipolice feeling in the aftermath of the events in Minneapolis a couple of years ago, we have had a dramatic increase in the number of murders. I think a lot of these murders have to be blamed on the timidity of the police, which is caused by this strong antipolice feeling that you are getting out of Joe Biden and his allies and the mainstream media, which I think also creates this antipolice feeling and causes the police to feel that they have to back off for fear they will be called racists or whatever.

Joe Biden again talked about white supremacy at Howard University, at their graduation. It was kind of a weird speech because I think normally in graduation speeches, you are dealing with the best and brightest in America. I know Howard has a very good reputation. You should have people leaving that stage with smiles on their faces, anxious to change the world and do wonderful things in the United States. Instead, we get President Biden showing up and saying what a racist society we have and creating, I think, a defeatist attitude for the people graduating there. I hope they got over Joe Biden's speech.

Joe Biden's Secretary of Labor--designated; she hasn't been confirmed yet--believes the country was built on white supremacy. She will not back off that statement, despite me asking her a couple of times to do so. The Secretary of Labor, who has something to do with all sorts of laws in this country, apparently believes our country was built on white supremacy.

The proposed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff feels we should be capping the number of White officers in the military at 42 percent. I mean, I would think he would be primarily concerned about getting the best people in there. It is important we have the best military in the world.

Instead, we are going to have a bean counter who it sounds like is more concerned about where people's great-great-great-grandparents were born than what their qualifications are today.

A study found, I mentioned before, in Joe Biden's first 2 years, of 97 judges he appointed, only 5 were White men. Two of those were gay. This was in the aftermath of two Democratic Senators telling President Biden they were not going to confirm any more of his appointees if they were White men unless they were gay.

To what degree are our judges being picked as the best, or to what degree are they being picked with Joe Biden feeling there is something wrong with appointing a White guy for the job?

Those are kind of amazing numbers, aren't they? I am not a big fan of President Biden, and I would have guessed, if you would have asked me how many White men were in his first 97 judges, I would say, well, he is probably doing all he can to find people who aren't White guys, so it is only 25 or 30. Well, it is only five.

In his budget, he is asking that all of his agencies--Department of Defense, Department of the Interior, wherever--have new equity action teams. These pernicious new employees, I think, are going to run around and judge people solely by race or gender. Their goal is supposedly to look at diversity, which we will talk about in a second. Again, their goal is to follow down this path of all Americans are supposed to view themselves as a subgroup.

He tried to discharge debt of only farmers of color until the courts shot him down there. He is trying to add a new preferred class. All these topics are recent topics. We ought to discuss this issue before it goes any further.

Right now, there are a variety of classes when you fill out your Census form, when you fill out your EEO-1, which is a form that you have to fill out if you do business with the government. They break out if you are Asian, Pacific Islander, African American, Latin American, Native American.

They want a new class--and I think with a class comes preferences-- for Middle Eastern and North African people. Again, I think we should have a public discussion here. I don't think Middle Eastern and North African people have been discriminated against or mistreated in America.

I assume most of the people, if there are benefits from this program, will come to people who just came here or are coming in the future. I haven't seen a lot of articles on that, but there should be a public discussion.

If somebody comes here from Syria, if somebody comes here from Algeria, should they get preferences in hiring? Should they get preferences if they found a business and are looking for a government contract? Should they get preferences if they want to get into medical school? That is what President Biden apparently wants, but I think we should have a public discussion on whether he gets away with it.

As an aside, I am not sure how Joe Biden feels the country is such a white supremacist country. I don't believe you can really judge people that are worth their happiness by the amount of income, but it is a number that is easy to judge. If you look online, most of the successful groups in America today are not of European heritage. The most successful are from India. Most Indians that I know came here and are wildly successful, although they came here without even knowing English--people from Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Cuba.

Thomas Sowell wrote a book 40 years ago--so it is a bit out of date, but I can't find any more recent information--in which he claims that people coming from the Caribbean, the children of people who come here from the Caribbean, make more money than the average American. I guess he would be talking about people from Jamaica.

I suppose you would think of people, therefore, like Kamala Harris' dad, who came here from Jamaica and wound up being a professor at Stanford. He did very well. I don't think he had a huge amount of experience with racism, becoming a professor at Stanford. I would think most professors would love to have a job like that.

Before we go that much further, I do think we should look at individual questions that should be answered. The first question is, right now, for the purpose of these government forms and who you hire, you kind of self-identify. We will pick Peru because I talked to someone from Peru the other day. If you came here directly from Peru, you are Peruvian and Latin American. If you have one of four grandchildren, they are also called Peruvian and are considered to bring a diverse attitude toward a job, or America supposedly should make up for past discrimination even though their ancestors may never even have been in America.

Is it 25 percent? Is it 12\1/2\ percent? The Senator from Massachusetts had one of these DNA tests, and she found out she was like 1/64th Native American or less than 1/64th, but she apparently felt that was enough to put on her forms and apparently add diversity to the Harvard Law School faculty. I don't know if she really thought that, but I guess she allowed herself to be labeled as Native American based on whatever that would be, one great-great-great-grandparent.

Is that the way we should go? Or should it be one out of eight? Like, if one of your eight great-grandparents is a certain type, is that enough to identify with that type? Now we have DNA tests, so we can look at these things.

I know in my district, there was a rumor. People questioned whether one person who owned a construction company was really a person of color like he claimed he was. He could have been because he could say he was one-eighth, and under the current law, that would be enough to get preferences. I think we ought to have that discussion.

The next question is, since affirmative action really began in the 1960s, the idea was to make up, I think, for America's past sins, so should you have to have ancestors in America who can at least claim to have been hurt, or can you get what amounts to special preferences if you just immigrated to this country, say, a year ago?

Right now, you don't even have to be a citizen. You can count on the government forms in which I think they view you more favorably if you have people from certain backgrounds, even if you were not in America for more than a couple of years. Should we require beneficiaries of these programs to be in America?

Were your ancestors slaves in America, or can you be like Kamala Harris' dad and just have moved here from Jamaica, whether you had preferences or not? I don't know.

The next issue that we should talk about is how long this should happen. We began to have affirmative action in the early 1960s. I think it really kicked into effect in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. There was a lesser program under John Kennedy.

We have had this program going for about 50 years. Obviously, they have added new groups that weren't included in the original number of groups. We have women in the mix now, too. How long should this program last with its government bureaucracy, with, in essence, government looking over people's shoulders, telling them who they have to hire for their company, that sort of thing? Another 10 years, another 100 years?

Thomas Sowell has written about affirmative action, so that is another issue that we will have to look at. We will return and talk about other issues after this evening. Not the least of which I think we should talk about is how certain people think since you are supposed to be bringing diversity to the table.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 58 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, June 22, 2023, at 10:30 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I urge this body to take up H. Res. 461 and pass it as quickly as possible.

Every year in this country the Federal Government, perhaps inappropriately, spends billions of dollars on elementary and secondary education. These buildings are designed and intended to be funded to teach the young children of this country, and not-so-young people, to read, to do math, to prepare themselves for a job.

It has been brought to our attention that local officials all around the country, in an effort to ease the mass invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern border, are now using these schools as a shelter for people, who in

many cases--in almost all cases--should not have come to the United States in the first place.

I think it is very important that Congress weigh in immediately, since we are providing billions of dollars to these educational institutions, and say no. These educational institutions are to be used for education only, and we are not going to spend any more of that money to support people who shouldn't be here in the first place.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of discussion going on this week about regulation. As we go home for this 3-day weekend, I encourage my colleagues, as they get around their district, whether they run into people who are in farming, in manufacturing, in banking-- particularly in the nursing home field--to ask those folks about the difference between regulatory rules that they live under today and 30 years ago. How many more man-hours are they spending every week filling out government forms that does nothing to make their bank or farm or manufacturing facility run better.

I think you will find them saying that they never would have gone into business in the first place if they knew about this blizzard of regulation, that they could not have swallowed it all at once but had to take a drip, drip, drip over 20 years.

In any event, I encourage my colleagues to get out to a different group that they normally don't deal with, the businessmen and -women-- the farmer, manufacturer, nursing home, banker--and they will find out that our country is unquestionably poor because of the sea of people we have filling out paperwork every week.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Congresswoman Debbie Lesko for her fight and for our fight regarding gas stoves.

What the Biden administration is trying to do with gas stoves is something that has become, sadly, more and more common from President Biden's party.

It doesn't matter to the Hollywood elite, it doesn't matter to the limousine liberals, it doesn't matter to the Silicon Valley billionaires, and it doesn't, quite frankly, matter to the welfare classes. However, it matters to the middle class as to what their electric or monthly energy bill is.

This is part of the Biden administration's effort to shut down gas stoves, which are much cheaper to operate than electric stoves, and it is a growing trend towards ignoring the middle class in America.

These other groups I don't think would know what their electric bill is, but we have to bring back the gas stoves on the grounds that it will save money for the middle class who does know exactly what their electric bill is.

Mr. Chairman, about 1 out of 3 Wisconsinites have a gas stove, and about 40 percent nationwide do. There is some name-calling over there as far as what the parties stand for.

The gas stove is about three times cheaper than the electric stove. The Republican Party is the party of the working class. The party that pays attention to what their energy bill is. There is another class of people out there: The rich Hollywood types, the high-tech billionaires, the well-paid college professors who don't have to worry how much they pay for electricity.

As a result, that side feels very good when a bill is passed where they restrict what the hoi polloi can do. Also, they don't have to worry about the welfare class because they will give stuff perhaps to the welfare class to make up the difference. But they won't help the middle class. And that is who the Republican Party tries to look out for. The average guy who knows exactly what he is paying in his energy bill.

Mr. Chair, I ask that we leave the working class alone.

Mr. Speaker, we go home every weekend. In June, when we go home to Wisconsin, what do we think of? What is going on in June? June is Dairy Month in Wisconsin. It is Dairy Month around the whole country.

Of course, last weekend, I spent Dairy Month at Breakfast on the Farm in Winnebago County and Breakfast on the Farm in Manitowoc County, having milk and all sorts of different cheeses.

Whether you like Colby or provolone, cheddar or mozzarella, whether you like your milk pasteurized or raw, whole or 2 percent, whether you like cream cheese or just plain cream, Wisconsin is America's Dairyland, and everybody has to remember, June is Dairy Month.

Now, on to our next topic. I have just been reading about a KGB defector. What he wrote should be required reading for all Congressmen and all young children. His name, he has since died, is Yuri Bezmenov. He was a Soviet defector in the 1980s.

When he defected--he defected to China--he gave an interview about the KGB. He said things that I think are far different than what the average American thinks about the KGB.

He pointed out that about 85 percent of the KGB employees were not spies. They were not going around looking for nuclear secrets or finding out more about our military. They were wide out in the open. They were engaging in psychological warfare, subversion to destroy the American psyche.

He pointed out that what they do is out in the open, if only the press would pay attention. Well, you can see he was a newcomer to America, as he thought the press might pay attention.

He pointed out that, at the time, people might think we were at peace, but in fact, we were at war. It was a war, psychological warfare.

Nikita Khrushchev said the same thing. He felt we would destroy America from within. It would not be a military attack that would destroy America. It would be America losing confidence in itself.

There are a variety of ways in which the United States is, in my mind, in danger. Last week, we talked about the huge deficit, and President Biden, through a variety of bills last year, certainly put the value of the dollar at risk.

You can say we are in danger because we are losing the value of the family. Of course, John Adams said that our Constitution is built for a moral and religious people, totally unfit for any other kind.

We have a situation here in which a group called Black Lives Matter, which had a lot to do with the Democrats maintaining their majority in 2020, Black Lives Matter was opposed to the traditional nuclear family. Of course, they have a lot of allies here in Congress who presumably didn't object to that.

That is another way we could tear down America, through our growing welfare state, having more and more people without the psychological background of a family.

We certainly have a problem at the southern border. No normal country could survive unlimited immigration. We see two things going on down there. We see over 200,000 people a month streaming across the border, and we also see, compared to past administrations, even people who break the law are not deported.

You could say that is another way we are being destroyed from within. It is not a military attack, but it is over 200,000 people who have not been trained how to become Americans, who have not had drilled into them the freedoms that we should respect and that we are a great country because our great Constitution is supposed to have a limited government, guarantee us a limited government, and we are supposed to be self-reliant. That is certainly a problem.

We have the bizarre transgender movement. I ran into a gal the other day who had literal surgery taking away some of her organs at 15 years old and puberty blockers. That is another way to completely try to blend the difference of the sexes, which would be another way to destroy society.

What I am going to focus on tonight is the Biden obsession with racism. I think if there is one issue that Joe Biden seems most obsessed over, it is this idea that supposedly in the United States we are a racist country. He brought it up four times in his inaugural speech and talked about white privilege once. This year, in his State of the Union speech, again Joe Biden talked about the racist police and if you are a person of color, you have to tell your children to watch out for the racist police. Obviously, this is an important message from Joe Biden.

He has certainly acted on it, as well. Right now, his Department of Labor nominee--she may make it; she may not--claimed in the past that we are a society built on white privilege, kind of this bizarre hatred of White people that I thought was merely in academia, but Joe Biden decided to try to appoint someone head of the Department of Labor who felt that way. I sure hope the Senate rejects her.

He is trying to appoint General Charles Q. Brown to be head of the Joint Chiefs. He right off the bat said we have too many White officers. He wants to restrict the number of White officers in the military to 43 percent. In other words, he doesn't want qualified White people becoming officers, because he has got some psychological problem there. I think we have to pay attention to that sort of thing when it comes to the Biden administration.

This is not limited to President Biden. Not long after he took office, both Senator Duckworth of Illinois and Senator Hirono of Hawaii threatened Joe Biden saying they did not want any more White men, that they were not going to vote to confirm any more White men in his administration. He met with them. They backed off that to a degree. I should say, he shouldn't appoint White men unless they are gay, which gets back to this kind of obsession with breaking away with the traditional family that we sadly have among the Democratic Party right now.

In addition to that, President Biden wants in his budget to have new equity action teams in all of our government agencies: the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice. These equity action teams presumably will enforce the type of things that Senators Duckworth and Hirono want. They want to look at people's race before anybody gets hired. They want to look at somebody's race before they get a government grant. I think it is something that the American public is not discussing anywhere nearly as much as they should.

It is kind of particularly ridiculous, because, of course, you are never probably going to have a country in which more immigrants, who have different ethnicity than the native born, have succeeded so much and are so accepted. If you look around, the most successful ethnic group in America today are Indian Americans. You look at other wildly successful groups: Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cuban. Thomas Sowell wrote 40 years ago--I can't vouch whether it is today or not-- but

by the second generation, immigrants from the Caribbean of African descent outperform the average American.

At a time when the overwhelming evidence is that racism has very little role in America, Joe Biden is trying to elevate the potentially hard feelings by doing all he can by not treating people equally and looking at people racially.

Now, I think we should have a discussion over this, and the discussion does not necessarily have to be in Congress, but it should be here, as well. I think the discussion should be in periodicals, online, as people debate what the answers to various questions are.

First of all, how long should this go on? Affirmative action--in other words, preferences based on race or based on sex, as well as preferences for women--have been going on since 1965. We have been going on with this thing 58 years. I have a feeling when Lyndon Johnson really kicked it off in earnest--there was a more mild policy under President Kennedy--when it was kicked off by President Johnson, I don't think even he would have dreamed that this would have been going on for 57 years. The question is, should there be a time when it ends.

When we give people preferences or identify people by their ethnic group, what defines somebody's ethnic group? Right now, we identify or put on the government forms African American, Latin American, Asian Pacific Islander, Native American. What makes up a person in these groups?

Right now you self-identify. In the extreme case of Elizabeth Warren, who was something like a 64th or a 128th Native American, she felt that was enough that she should be a Native American. I think she is relatively rare. I don't think a lot of Americans would do that, but apparently it is legal. It was a way for her to become a professor at Harvard Law School. But what should be the cutoff? A half a percent? A quarter a percent? One-eighth?

On the face of it, it seems a little bit strange, because a lot of these people you would never even guess what ethnicity they are, but that is the way the system works nowadays. We do have DNA tests nowadays. I think we should put some sort of standards as to who gets preferences.

Then where you come from. Right now, if you are somebody whose ancestry was in Spain and you come to the United States, you are considered a European, but if your ancestry is Spain and your ancestors spent three generations in Cuba, you are considered an ethnic minority. To me, that seems a little bit silly. I am not sure what the difference is.

Maybe the person from Spain just came here right now and the person from Cuba, one-quarter Cuban, came here 50 years ago. Does this make any sense that when you fill out the forms or see who is going to get the government contract or who is going to get into Harvard Law School, that the person from Cuba is treated different than the person from Spain? If we have someone from Italy or somebody who was of Italian descent but spent three generations in Argentina, should that person be given preference? I think that is something we should have a public discussion over.

Should you have to be from America? Right now, the way these programs work, if you show up, if you are not even a citizen, you can get preferences on the form.

You have an example right now, the Vice President's own dad who came here from Jamaica. Originally, at the time this affirmative action kicked in, I thought it was a little bit to make up for slavery or make up for Jim Crow. Well, somebody like the Vice President's dad, he wasn't mistreated in America. He wasn't in America at all. He came here for the land of opportunity, came here to become a professor at Stanford University. Is that fair?

When we try to identify different groups as somebody who really never suffered in the United States at all, because they are a recent immigrant, should they be getting these preferences? I think that is something that should be talked about. I don't know.

Should there be a wealth component? We are supposedly helping the underserved communities, but the way the programs work today and the different areas that they pick out--I think it is government employment, employment in businesses that do business with the government, government contractors, if you have a business, and admissions to universities.

Should there be a wealth component? If I am the son of a multi- multimillionaire who is a member of a favored group, do I get preferences?

It kind of seems wrong to say I am an underserved group, but that is the way it works today, which is typical, and we will come back in a second to what Thomas Sowell says about affirmative action.

He wrote a book on the topic. Usually it benefits the well-off people, as things that come up from the progressive background usually do.

Should there be some familiarity with your background? I mean, if I am going to claim to get preferences because my ancestors came from Peru, should I have to know something about Peru?

Somebody that doesn't even know Spanish, has spent generations here, never lived in a Spanish country, should I get preferences there? Should that have something to do with this?

Are there jobs that should be exempt from preferences where it is entirely based on merit? One of the things that is going on in America today is a lot of medical schools are saying you don't have to take the MCAT test.

Now, when I was younger, we usually associated doctors with the ones that did the best on the test because if you were going to be a doctor, it was a matter of life and death. We wanted to take the smartest person no matter what.

Now we have medical schools saying we don't want to look at any test to determine your intelligence. We want to base your admission on things like what you say on an essay or how many groups you volunteered for, that sort of thing.

I think we should have that discussion. Maybe we should have preferences for certain jobs like college professor where you can say it is not a matter of life and death if we have somebody who is not as good, but we should make sure we always get the better people for the medical field or for dentistry or for airline pilots or air traffic controllers.

Should we say, well, we can afford to have people that aren't good air traffic controllers because what is the worst thing that could happen?

I think that is another question that we should be asking right now because the Biden administration is clearly walking down this path.

That is why they have these what we are referring to as equity action teams. We want to know exactly what standards the equity action teams are using.

I had a fellow come up to me a few years ago whose son worked in one of our Federal agencies, and he loved the job. He went to college for the job.

He was told after 9 or 10 years why he was not being promoted. He was told, you are a White guy who is not a veteran. We give preferences to veterans too.

Is that fair? If they are going to continue down that path, shouldn't we at least make it public so this guy wouldn't have gone to school to learn about a field that he wanted to excel in, only to be told 10 years later that he is a White guy, he is not a veteran, too bad? I think that is something that ought to be discussed before we hurt any other people.

In any event, I think this is a topic to look at. I think it is certainly one way to cause hard feelings in America.

I have talked about Thomas Sowell who wrote a book dealing with affirmative action about 40 years ago now. He pointed out that other countries that went down this path--America's not all the way down the path--but have the same experiences as America.

First of all, it begins, and it is supposed to be temporary; 57 years later, it is still here. It is supposed to be restricted to maybe one or two ethnic groups, but here in America, first people of African decent, and then people who never were mistreated in the United States come here and are automatically given preferences based on where their ancestors were born centuries ago.

We begin to add other groups. I make another point about why this is relevant, because Joe Biden is also trying to add another preference group.

He wants to add Middle Eastern and North African people. Right now, I rattled off all the different backgrounds

that we are supposed to be keeping track of, but we don't keep track of people from Algeria or Syria or Iraq, and Joe Biden wants to do that, as well.

I think we should have a discussion there. There are not a lot of people in this country with backgrounds from those countries, but there are more and more people coming here.

Joe Biden apparently says that if you are from America, and you apply for a job, and we have an immigrant from Algeria or an immigrant from Iraq, people like that should be given preferences.

Well, I think maybe that is something we should talk about here a little bit and see what the appropriate course of action is.

Whatever the course of action is, it should be after a thorough public discussion, not just something, you know, pushed in under the table because it is a sensitive topic.

In any event, I would ask the press to look into this situation. We want to find out what rules President Biden's equity action teams are operating under.

We want to have a public discussion. Is it right to add North African and Middle Easterners to this topic?

Should we give preferences to people who have no background of discrimination in America, people who just show up and immediately get preferences?

I obviously have my strong opinions, but I would like to hear what the pundit class, that so many of us read, has to say.

I would like to see maybe sometime the Committee on Education and the Workforce or the Judiciary Committee look into this and see what the different viewpoints are because it affects a lot of Americans. We are kind of moving down this train without having a public discussion.

Those are my comments on that topic. I think it is a topic more people ought to look into. I think they ought to review how some people want to destroy America from within.

I think they ought to review what happened in other countries as they went down the affirmative action path, be it Nigeria, be it Sri Lanka, be it Malaysia or Singapore, and I think a lot of times it doesn't work out very well.

It is something we ought to have a discussion about, and nobody else is talking about it around here, so we throw that open for discussion.

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

Madam Speaker, most of the discussion in this building over the last 2 weeks has been on the debt limit, and I guess I should lead off by addressing it a little bit.

A lot of the American public is thinking, why are people fighting on this bill? What difference does it really make? Let us get it behind us.

I want to leave the American public with two reasons why at least the Republican Party wants a little bit more fiscal restraint than otherwise would happen.

First of all, the debt is now 100 percent of GDP. It is just shy of that. That is the first time it has happened since World War II.

At the end of World War II, we knew we were going to lay off millions of people in the military. We were going to stop making ships. We were going to stop making planes. We were going to stop making tanks. So, there would be a dramatic reduction in government spending, and that is exactly what happened.

Slowly, the debt fell from 100 percent to a little over 20 percent of GDP before recently rocketing up, in part due to COVID and in part due to President Biden's reckless spending.

Now, we are at 100 percent of GDP, but all we see in the future is more people retiring, more money spent on Social Security, and more money spent on Medicare. We can never cut either one of those two programs--we should not--which means we have to exercise fiscal restraint everywhere else.

The time to do that is now. If we do not dial things back a little now, it is going to get that much worse next year and that much worse the year after.

The other thing I want to leave the American public with is, with interest rates going up, we right now are spending every year about $2,000 per man, woman, and child on interest rates alone.

If you are a family of four--think about that--every year you have to start by paying $8,000 just to cover your share of the Federal debt. That is a disaster.

If we don't address it now, then it is going to be worse next year.

The Republican position is very moderate. Probably the public would be outraged if they found out how moderate the Republican position is. We do not plan on balancing the budget this year.

Even if the Republicans got all they asked for, and they are not going to get all they asked for, but even if they got all they asked for, it would still result in a significant increase in debt over the next year.

The brakes should be put on a little bit. We should acknowledge the problem.

The Republicans love their children, and they love their grandchildren. They don't want to see the country that much more in debt, and we are worried we are approaching the point of no return.

In any event, I am proud my Republican leadership attitude is that we have to do something when we see debt equal to 100 percent of GDP and when every American is paying $2,000 of interest by itself. The only responsible thing to do is put up a little bit of a fight. I wish some of the Democrat leadership would acknowledge more that something has to be done.

However, despite the fact that this is the most covered issue in America, President Biden recently addressed the graduates of Howard University here in town, and he felt one of the major issues of the day is white supremacy.

I do not think we should let such inflammatory, divisive, and bitter rhetoric go unanswered, and it is not the first time President Biden has done this. This has been a theme whenever he speaks to the American public as a whole.

He talked about it in his inaugural speech, where he mentioned racism four times and white supremacy once. He talked about it in his State of the Union speech this year, where he attacked our police and one more time called them racist. Now, in the Howard commencement, a time for a positive speech, a time to tell the graduates they have their whole life ahead of them and they can do anything in America, President Biden got in the mud and talked about white supremacy.

First of all, we have to address that we have a problem in America in which people cannot succeed. There have been numerous speeches dealing with police and racism, and the studies show that racism is not a problem, that when you look at people being shot when adjusted for crimes committed, if anything, White people are more likely to get killed than Black people in a confrontation with police.

Nevertheless, President Biden, Mr. Negative, decided to use his annual speech to Congress to trash the police and refer to them as being racist.

Now, are people who are not of European descent having problems in this country?

Well, look at people from different countries around the world. First of all, again and again, we find people from all around the world coming here. I have a list of the countries that people give up their citizenship to and become American.

The top 10 countries are: (1) Mexico; (2) India; (3) Philippines; (4) Cuba; (5) Dominican Republic; (6) China; (7) Vietnam; (8) Jamaica; (9) El Salvador; (10) Colombia.

Do you notice anything about those countries?

None of them are European countries. People from all around the world are desperate to come into the United States legally.

If America were a country in which you were punished if you weren't of European descent, you would not see the 10 countries most commonly coming here being from places other than Europe.

I have heard that a significant number of Russians are coming here, but I have been at the border probably seven or eight times over the last 3 years. Again, I see people from Africa, Central America, the Middle East.

I have attended ceremonies in which people were sworn in as citizens in Milwaukee. When I have shown up at these ceremonies, I would be surprised if 5 percent of the people becoming Americans are from Europe.

This weekend, I'm going to attend a Memorial Day event for the Hmong. The Hmong, for those of you who don't know, are a group of people primarily, but not exclusively, from Laos who came to this country after the Vietnam war and were allowed in this country because they did so much to help fight communism on behalf of the Americans.

When the Hmong came here, they frequently did not know English. Many of them were not Christian. As a matter of fact, for many of the Hmong, they knew no written language of any sort at all. Nevertheless, they come here, and they thrive.

Again and again, when I talk to members of the Hmong, I ask them: How are your children doing? How are your nieces and nephews doing?

I get stories about their children, nieces and nephews, their 20, 25 kids, everyone is successful. Everyone is doing well in school. None of them are committing any crimes. They are all having children and living in a family situation.

I cannot help but think watching the tremendous success story of the Hmong, how could any President say America is a difficult country to live in if you are not European?

Then I look at income. I realize there are many definitions of success. I am not somebody at all who says economic success is the most important.

I look at the numbers so far as they are available on the internet. I look at India, which seems to be right now financially the most successful subgroup in America, making 80 percent more than the average American.

India is a country in which a relatively small number of people are considered Christian; overwhelmingly Hindu, to a lesser degree, Muslim.

I look at the Philippines, 50 percent more; Sri Lanka, 33 percent more; Japan, 30 percent more; Malaysia, 25 percent more; Pakistan, 18 percent more; people coming here from Cuba; to a certain extent, Latin America, 15 percent more than European Americans is what they make.

It is harder to find some other information. However, Thomas Sowell, who I think very highly of, wrote a book called ``Ethnic America'' 40 years ago. At that time, Thomas Sowell pointed out that the average second-generation person from the Caribbean was making more than the average American. That, of course, is largely people of Black descent, people from the Bahamas, people from Jamaica.

Again, the tremendous financial success of people coming from all around the world makes one realize that America does not have a huge racial problem.

Another question is: Does America discriminate in favor of people of European descent?

The answer is right now, under our affirmative action programs in this country, whether you are looking at hiring government people, whether you

are looking at businesses who contract with the government, do at least $10,000 of business with the government, they are required to fill out an EEO-1 form in which they list the race of all their employees.

When they fill out that form, because they are afraid of being sued, the average American business is very conscious and is sometimes even told by their adviser to hire people who are not White.

Affirmative action began in 1965 in this country in earnest. It was a little bit before that, but in earnest in 1965. We are talking over 50 years ago.

Original affirmative action was designed primarily to help Black people, but in the interim, we added Asian people.

This, by the way, is typical of affirmative action around the world. It starts with one group, and then every other group says, I want the government to weigh in on my behalf.

We added Asian, Pacific Islander, and Latin American, we added women. Now, we recently have had the Biden administration weigh in and say we want to add people of Middle Eastern or North African descent. We want to add people from Syria, from Iraq, from Algeria to the list of people who should get preferences. You will notice not White.

This comes into play in forms that have to be filled out when we say, who is going to be getting government contracts. Who is going to be getting into colleges and universities. Who is going to be the owner of a business that gets government contracts.

It is very pervasive in our society. Very few Americans--I have tried--are aware that when a big business, say even a business with 100 employees, a business with 50 employees, when they hire someone and they have a government contract, they are paying attention or have to fill out a form as to the race and gender of that person.

As a practical matter, it causes people to be a little bit less reluctant to hire people who have historically been here in America.

Now, I think these programs, when they implement them, are designed to be as divisive as possible. First of all, in order to qualify as a favored group, you self-identify. If you are one-half, one-quarter or one-eighth a member of that group, you can say I am a member of the protected class. I am not sure that is right. It obviously is wrong.

People wouldn't even know if someone who is one-quarter Native American, one-quarter whatever, is a member of that class, but you get to check off that box and get the benefits.

Wealth has nothing to do with it. You can be born into a family with millions and millions of dollars, but if you are from the right ethnic group or at least one-quarter or one-eighth of the right ethnic group, you get to be checked off on that form. Again, it could be true even if a person wouldn't guess you are a member of that minority.

It affects university admissions. For quite a while we have had a string of cases, one case, which is working its way through the Supreme Court right now, is about, again, trying to give preferences to people who are one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth members of a minority.

To push it even further, lately schools or graduate schools are removing SAT scores or MCAT scores where traditionally people have to take these tests, for example, to make sure the best and the brightest are getting into medical school.

We are taking that off the table and increasing the number of medical schools, again, because they are afraid that they will be letting in too many people of traditional ethnic backgrounds in America.

We are doing the same thing lately with regard to loans given out by banks, which is kind of amazing. Now, bankers have to collect--they are going to do it soon for commercial lending; they have done it in the past for residential lending--what is the race or gender or even sexual preference. Apparently the government likes to look over the shoulder of these banks and make sure that they are not discriminating based on race or discriminating based on sexual preference.

It is kind of hard to believe that that is going on, but it is. They really keep track of these banks. I talked to a banker a little while ago, he had to put down on the form what the race is of the guy who plowed the snow in his parking lot.

Now, you might say why is that any of the government's business? Why are they doing it?

Well, we know why they are doing it, they want to put pressure on the banks to feel that that is something that should be taken into account before you fill out that contract. This becomes more and more a part of the American background.

I recently ran into a gal who told me she worked for a bank, and they had an opening for months. They couldn't fill that opening because all their applicants were White guys.

I don't know whether she is right or wrong on that, but talking to some other bankers, that is entirely possible. We should have a discussion whether that is right.

You have to say, where is this ending?

What is the goal of the Biden administration?

A study was done a little while ago on the Federal Judiciary. I wish we had these studies for all other appointments by the Biden administration. Apparently in his first 2 years, President Biden appointed 97 Federal judges. Of the 97 Federal judges, I was expecting maybe 25 or 30 were White guys because I know President Biden wasn't heavy on appointing more White guys.

Five of the 97 judges were White guys. Of those, two were gay. It is almost impossible for a White guy who is not gay, apparently, to get appointed here.

To a certain extent, that was not just President Biden's fault. Not long after he was sworn in, two Democrat Senators, one from Illinois and one from Hawaii, said that they did not want to vote to confirm any more of President Biden's appointees if they were White men unless they were gay.

Again, the definition of diversity--and more and more, they are talking about diversity as being part of the reason here.

As far as the idea that where your ancestors come from will determine what a good doctor you are or what a good electrician you are or whatever, seems a little bit ridiculous.

For example, let's say my maternal grandfather was Peruvian, and he died before I was born. Well, the idea that giving me a special place in college or a special job in management so I can bring the Peruvian viewpoint to the table would be ridiculous.

We are talking about a grandfather who had nothing at all. I was never in Peru, never met him, but that is the way the current system works, and it is something that should be discussed.

Now, what is the Biden team doing now that is going to affect these very pernicious programs in America?

The first thing they are going to do is they are going to add another protected class: Middle Eastern and North African people.

Right now, you are considered Asian if you are from Japan. We can go around the map: Japan, China, Thailand, Pakistan, India. It stops in Pakistan.

There are no preferences if you are from Egypt, Algeria or Syria. The Biden administration wants to end that even though affirmative action began in the 1960s.

Almost all people of this descent were not even in America prior to that, but they want to be a new group that should be getting preferences.

I think that should be discussed in America's news pages. Instead, it is not even brought up that it is happening.

The next thing the Biden administration is doing is they are putting new diversity equity teams in every one of the government agencies, be it Commerce, Defense, Agriculture, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, Transportation. Every agency is getting a new group to weigh in on diversity and to make sure that the right people are getting jobs in that agency. If there are grants going on in that agency, again, to make sure the right people are getting grants.

In other words, the Biden administration wants to greatly increase the power of this class of people in picking who gets anything around society. It can't just be like it used to be, let's take the best person.

These new programs, I think, cause one to say more questions ought to be raised by the American public and answered by the Biden administration.

Do we care about merit anymore?

Should these programs benefit millionaires?

Right now, if you are worth $20 million, and you apply for a government contract, you are given preferences despite the fact you are already wildly wealthy.

By the way, Thomas Sowell, when he writes about affirmative action points out that frequently around the world when we do this affirmative action stuff, it benefits primarily the wealthy.

What percent should you be before you get credit for preferences based on your background? Right now it is open ended. Should it be an eighth, should it be a sixteenth? Senator Elizabeth Warren apparently was smaller than 1/64th or 1/128th Native American. She felt that should give her preference apparently in becoming a law professor at Harvard University. So what percent should we be looking at?

Are there any jobs that we should go back to old-fashioned merit based?

How about a doctor? Should we get the best people we can to be heart surgeons? I would think so.

How about air traffic controllers?

How about engineers who are designing bridges? Or are all jobs primarily based on ethnic background and not necessarily on merit?

As mentioned, this new special interest group put in there by President Biden, the Middle Eastern North African group, largely came to this country after affirmative action began. Originally, the idea behind affirmative action was America discriminated against you in the past and you deserve a step up to get caught up. Here you have people who were not even in America.

Again, Thomas Sowell, when he talks about these race preference things and these race bureaucracies, points out that it always hurts a country when people view themselves as a member of an ethnic group first and view themselves as a citizen of that country secondly.

I look at Canada, which I think has always had problems throughout my whole lifetime in that it is divided between people who speak French and people who speak English.

I look at Nigeria, where we had a division between tribes and a division between the Muslims in the north and the Christians of the south, which resulted in a civil war and millions of people dying.

We look at Rwanda and the horrific things that happened there as the country is divided into races.

India with its not only ethnic differences but religious differences.

Sri Lanka had a horrible civil war as the government began to weigh in on this group and that group.

Historically, America has stuck with its motto, ``e pluribus unum,'' ``out of many, one.'' Okay, we come from all around the world, but we consider ourselves Americans first, and we eventually kind of drop or rarely think about where our ancestry came from. Al Gore twice embarrassed himself by getting the meaning of ``e pluribus unum'' screwed up; and he said, ``out of one, many.''

In other words, right now we have people who primarily consider themselves American, and the Biden administration says, well, wait a minute, you should primarily consider yourself based upon where your great-great-great-grandparents are from. That is just a big mistake.

What can we do here? I think, first of all, there should be more of an outcry over the Biden administration's plan to give what amounts to preferences to Middle Eastern North African people. Again, immigrants who came here recently, not prejudiced, I am sure doing very well. I think the only reason you bring them into the loop is if you want to destroy America through divisiveness, which has happened in many other countries around the world.

Then we ought to get rid of these racial equity committees in which we have apparently government bureaucrats whose sole job is to divide Americans or judge Americans or weigh the worth of Americans by their ethnic background.

Increasingly, when I look at what is going on with the bankers, it is not just going to be ethnic background, it is going to be sexual background, as well. Is that right? I don't know who could possibly think it is right that the banker has to at the end of the month go through the forms that he has accepted for loans as to say, do I have enough people of the right sexual background, but that is the way we are going in America. I hope we end it.

These programs began almost 60 years ago; I think now about 57 years ago. Like programs around the world, when they began these programs of preferences, they were supposed to be temporary. Like I said, I think when they began these programs in the 1960s, if you told people they would still be around 57 years later, you never would have believed it, and you sure wouldn't have believed it if you thought we were going to add all these other groups, most of which were not even in the United States at the time added to the mix.

I hope we have a public discussion on that. I have listed the questions that should be answered, and hopefully it is something that, if nobody else, at least the pundit class can weigh in on, and we can educate our young people as to what is going on because I think a lot of these preferences, particularly with regard to jobs in businesses that are government contracting, the public is not even aware of.

That is a summary of what I think is an important issue and ought to be addressed.

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

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 50 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, May 26, 2023, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, we received a briefing as to what was going on in the Russia-Ukraine war, and we heard of the callousness with which President Putin treats his own troops.

Indeed, 20,000 Russian troops recently died to take a city that was apparently of no important significance.

I thought, how could a President be so callous knowing that when one of these troops died, his parents, his siblings, and perhaps his children are left behind?

Then it occurred to me that here in the United States of America, we had 109,000 people die of illegal drugs last year, most of it fentanyl, and our President seems to be willing to do almost nothing.

Mr. Speaker, since almost all the drugs are coming across the southern border, with 109,000 people dying every year, wouldn't you figure it is a priority to close the border? No.

Wouldn't you think it is a priority to arrest or put in prison those people who are selling these drugs? No.

The major concern is to leave the border open and not put any more people in prison.

By the way, as far as the ability to prevent people from selling the drugs and putting them in prison, how many people died of fentanyl last year in China? None. Why? Because the minute they try to sell it, they would be in prison.

In any event, I call upon President Biden to finally address the fentanyl crisis.

Mr. Speaker, it is the time for authorizations, and one of the topics of discussion today, of course, is our armed services authorizations, military bills, as we get briefings on what is necessary to defend our country from our external enemies.

However, let us not forget that when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the American public in the 1960s, he said:

We will take America without firing a shot. We will bury

you. We can't expect the American people to jump from

capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected

leaders in giving them small doses of socialism until, one

final day, they wake up and find they are living in a

communist government.

Now, how could our great country, the strongest country in the world, be destroyed from within?

I also point out that when the KGB was active in this country in the seventies and eighties, the majority of agents were not spies. They were not engaged in looking for our military secrets. They were, apparently, out in the open, trying to corrupt Americans into how they understood our country should be operating. They were taking advantage of our freedoms in what is supposed to be a constitution made for a moral and religious people.

How would you go about destroying America from within? First of all, briefly, we would try to destroy the currency. We know there has been wild and reckless spending recently, to the degree that our debt-to-GDP ratio is the highest it has been since the end of World War II. Our debt to gross national product is almost 100 percent.

We were there at the end of World War II, but we knew at the end of World War II, millions of people were going to be laid off from the military. We were going to stop building ships, planes, and tanks that we needed. Sure enough, we dropped from about 100 percent of GDP to a little over 20 percent during Nixon until we began to slowly creep up again.

More recently, in part because of irresponsible legislation like the American Rescue Plan or the successor to Build Back Better, which were able to pass because the Democrats had the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and were able to use something called reconciliation to get it done, we have now shot back up near 100 percent, near an all-time high.

This time, we don't see an area in the future in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors are going to be laid off or that we are going to stop building weaponry. Contrary to that, we do see an aging population in which the amount we spend on Social Security and Medicare is going to continue to go up.

I think you could say getting ahold of these people in this House and persuading way too many of them that spending doesn't work, we have approached an area, a crisis area, which could result in the end of the United States.

Secondly, I think if I were going to destroy America, I would try to destroy the family. Beginning in the 1960s, we had a welfare program that was largely conditioned upon keeping one parent, usually the father, out of the house.

This goal was made more apparent when Black Lives Matter, which played such a big role in the 2020 elections, outright came out and said they were opposed to the Western-prescribed nuclear family. Of course, there was a tight alliance between Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party.

Within a few years of the Great Society in the sixties, it was apparent that the welfare system was destroying families. Patrick Moynihan, who eventually became a Senator up here, made it clear, by 1970, we were destroying families with this welfare program.

Apparently, because some people wanted to destroy families, his warnings went unheeded. We worked our way toward a higher and higher percentage of children being raised without a father in the home.

We also worked our way toward too many men not having families and not

having a necessary purpose in life. Therefore, the crime rate went up, this sort of thing.

I think another area in which you can see people working toward communism were the people who wanted to expand this welfare state. We all know, to get so many of the programs the welfare state offers, be it low-income housing, medical care, Pell grants, all of these things, it is kind of conditioned upon not having a man in the house.

The next area that I think we have to look at if one is destroying America from the inside is unlimited immigration across our southern border. Right now, on legal immigration, we swore in about a million people last year, which is the highest it has been since 2006.

It varies from month to month, but in a normal month right now, there are about 10 times the number of people coming into this country as were coming in under the prior administration.

Why in the world would you allow--completely unnecessary. This was not a problem 2, 2\1/2\ years ago. Why would you allow virtually unfettered immigration across our southern border unless you want to destroy our country?

These people who come here are not necessarily educated in what it means to be an American. They do not receive a background check that includes their home countries. It is a recipe for disaster. Like I said, it is at a time when we are near record numbers of legal immigrants.

We also know that the Biden administration is deporting people who commit crimes at a rate of about one-quarter that Donald Trump was. Not only are you allowing more people here, but even if you catch them doing something wrong, you don't evict them. I think one way to destroy America is just to let unlimited numbers of people come here, in this case, across the southern border.

The next area that I think has to be looked at is Joe Biden's obsession with blurring the differences between the sexes, which, after all, is the foundation for the family. We can see the push toward transgenderism throughout all areas of society.

There is a hospital near my district in which they remove the breasts of teenage girls, 15-year-old girls. They put people on puberty blockers. They give people other medications. They put it in people's minds--in boys' minds that they might not be a traditional man, in girls' minds that they might not be a traditional woman. This is another way, I think, to eat away at the moral fabric of America.

The area I am going to focus on today is the Biden administration's obsession with race and trying to divide Americans by race. In his inaugural speech, I believe he mentioned racism four times and white supremacy once.

In other words, if you have to say what is the theme behind Joe Biden's inaugural speech, and different Presidents have different themes, it is racism. He has continued along that path.

When he gave his State of the Union speech here a couple of months ago, he talked about racism with the police.

Over the weekend, he gave a speech--I believe it was at Howard University, but at some university, a graduation speech. One more time, his emphasis was that we have a major problem with white supremacy in this country.

First of all, let's look at the facts. Even his premise isn't true. Then, we will look at the damage that can be done as we try to have Americans look at themselves racially or look at themselves by where their ancestors were born five or six generations ago.

If you look at countries around the world, people who come here from other than European countries, you see people succeeding wildly. By this, I mean succeeding wildly financially. I realize finances aren't the most important thing in the world.

Right now, the ethnic group that makes more money than any other in the United States--and I had this pointed out by a friend of mine who was very proud of it because he is Indian--is Indian Americans who come here, many of them, most of them, not even knowing the English language. They are mostly not Christian. They are Hindu, a few Muslim. They come here and are wildly successful.

Many other groups--Filipino, Sri Lankan, Cuban--all come here and make more money than the average American.

It is so obvious that racism does not prevent people from living the American Dream.

Over the weekend, I spent some time with the Hmong. The Hmong are an ethnic group from Laos that helped the United States in the Vietnam war, and because they helped the United States, many of them immigrated to America.

Wisconsin happens to be the State in which we have the third highest number of Hmong, and I always enjoy talking with them to see how wildly successful they are. Again, this is a group that is not European and many did not know English when they came here.

When I look around my district, Hmong are, almost uniformly, living the American Dream. Interestingly, when I talk to them, almost all of them have formed old-fashioned nuclear families, which, I think, helps emotionally and spiritually with their children.

Like I said, educationally, economically, across the board, the Hmong from Oshkosh and Neenah, Wisconsin--I spent the weekend in Manitowoc, Wisconsin--are succeeding wildly, and that is consistent with the statistics of other ethnic groups.

So, what is Joe Biden and the Democrats' response to this wild success of people from around the world, and people, by the way, who are not of European heritage?

I should also point out that a couple of times I do something that I enjoy doing. I go down and watch the swearing-in ceremonies of people coming here legally and becoming American citizens. They have them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

When I go down there, almost none of the new citizens coming here are from Europe. Overwhelmingly, it is Asia, Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, all coming here. When you talk to them, because they have had to be around here a few years, they all already are successful, all so proud to be Americans. None are running away from this country, and none of them mention racism as a problem.

Again, it is further evidence that we shouldn't have a problem.

Now, how has the Biden administration met with this situation? How has our government as a whole, over the last 50 years, dealt with this situation?

First of all, at the beginning of Joe Biden's term, 2 or 3 months in, we had two Democratic Senators, Tammy Duckworth and Mazie Hirono, at a time when the Senate was 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, so every vote was necessary for Joe Biden to get his nominees appointed. They came out and said that they were not going to vote for any more White men who are nominated to positions--kind of a shocking thing.

Then, they met with Joe Biden, who, I assume, held their hands. By the way, they said they would accept White men if they were gay. I would assume he held their hands and said there were a few White guys who he had to allow in his administration.

Nevertheless, an obscure legal journal did some studying after the first 2 years of the Biden administration. They looked at the 97 new judges, which are some of the appointments a President has to make. When they looked at the 97 judges, I would have expected maybe 25 or 30 being White men, which would have been, I think, lower than if you just picked a number of lawyers across the board, say, over the age of 35 to be judges. I would have guessed 20 or 25, and I would have thought that is clearly too low. It was five.

Only 5 of 97 judges appointed in Joe Biden's first year were White men and two of them happened to be gay, which is something that has been hidden by the American press corps.

I am not sure how typical this is of his other appointments, but clearly Joe Biden is using this as a tool to discriminate or to divide Americans. He is also, in his proposed budget, adding new employees in every agency--Commerce, Interior, Education, wherever you look--to enforce this sort of racial identification.

I am sure he plans on them weighing in as to who gets new jobs. I am sure he plans on them weighing in on who gets grants as businesses around the country compete for grants. This is another way in which Joe Biden's actions are meeting his words. He wants to turn America into a country of competing ethnic groups.

Another thing he is doing that has been underpublicized right now is for the purpose of determining whether a group needs preferences or not. We look at Asians, and by Asians, we mean people coming all the way from Japan around Asia, all the way through Pakistan, but not Iran. We mean people from sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, countries like that. We mean Latin America, which could mean Cubans, it could mean Colombians, could mean Haitians, whatever, these people get preferences.

By the way, they get preferences over the native born. If somebody shows up here from Nigeria, if somebody shows up here from Bolivia, for the purposes of the forms that American businesses have to fill out or that universities may fill out, these people who just arrive here get preferences over the native born, and that is true even if they are already wealthy when they come here.

If I am a Cuban who comes here worth a million dollars or well off in Cuba planning to be a doctor in the United States, I will right away get preferences on these forms over Americans who have been here for generations.

President Biden, however, wants to add another group that can walk around with a chip on their shoulder and be told they are discriminated against. Those are people from the Arab world. Because right now, people from Syria, people from Algeria, people from Egypt are not considered minorities. They don't get special treatment. Well, President Biden has made it clear that in the future he is taking the first administrative steps to say this group should identify by their ethnicity, identify by where they come from. Of course, when the bean counters in the universities, the bean counters doing the hiring in the Federal Government, when they get hold of these people, they will look to give them preferences because they are supposedly picked on by not being of European heritage.

I think a lot of Americans do not realize that this affirmative action has been around for quite some time. Affirmative action, in general, really was promoted a lot beginning 1965, which is to say about 57 years ago. Thomas Sowell has written about affirmative action around the globe and, of course, affirmative action was originally supposed to be temporary for people of African-American descent.

Well, like affirmative action programs all over the world, it was not temporary. We have had it for 75 years. And not only is it not temporary, but you have a bureaucracy growing up promoting this affirmative action. As it expanded from where it initially was to include other areas, it was expanded to include Asians, it was expanded to include Latin Americans, it was expanded to include women.

Right now, for the purposes of forms, having talked to people who deal with this in human resources departments around the country, all these other groups are supposedly or sometimes advised to get preference.

The first time I ran across this--and I will digress for one second-- you are supposed to fill out a form called the EE01 if you have either 100 employees or less than that and you contract with the government. I first ran across this when I was contacted by a human resources woman and they had to fill out the EE01. I think they had 100 employees, but they also sold some of their product to the Federal Government. They were a manufacturer.

She said the firm that they hired to see how to deal with this relationship with the Federal Government--there was a situation in which they had four or five engineers, they wanted to hire a fifth or sixth engineer and they were advised by this group that they should hire a woman. They didn't have to hire a woman, but if they didn't hire a woman and the Federal Government looked at them, they may get in trouble for not hiring a woman. So they gave them a card of some group somewhere referred to as the Wisconsin Society of Women Engineers and they were told you should hire a woman.

Then they wanted to hire another member of management and the same group told them, you don't have to hire a minority, but if you don't hire a minority, you might get in trouble. You should look around and see what you can do to hire minorities.

About 20 years ago, I dealt with this situation. It has been around for over 50 years. Again, a goal apparently of which--since we don't have a big prejudice problem in this country--is to try to encourage people to walk around with a chip on their shoulder or ask for something because of their ethnicity.

There are a variety of what I think are ridiculous rules that, in addition to the fact that it is wrong on its face, that we should look at regarding this affirmative action program.

First of all, you self-identify. Now, an extreme example of that is the Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, she felt that she was a 64th or 128th Native American, so she should get preferences. But it is more common to have somebody who is maybe one-quarter something to self-identify as, let's say, Latin American or something.

In this new world in which we have all these overpaid bureaucrats, both in private industry and in the government, by identifying as one- quarter Cuban, you have the potential to get preferences.

Now, that is just divisive. It is ridiculous on its face. It also doesn't matter how wealthy you are. Like I said, you could be Barack Obama's daughters worth millions and millions of dollars, but you fill out the form and for the purposes of university admissions, for the purpose of Federal employment, you are treated as somebody put upon, somebody who should walk around with a chip on their shoulder, somebody who should get preferences.

In any event, I think it is something that the American public should be aware of and look to end. These programs were originally designed only for Black Americans and when they began well over 60 years ago, it was supposed to be something that was temporary.

Instead, Joe Biden, I believe, is using it, the progressives are using it to try to divide America, to try to create a situation in which our future elections are contests between ethnic groups.

America is unique in that so far in our existence, people view themselves as Americans above all, and when they go to vote, they vote on issues: How much should we be spending on the military?

How much should we be spending on transportation, maybe social issues?

Abortion has recently been a big issue. Taxation, how we should deal with taxation.

However, the people who push this, I think, are causing people to vote and say which politician is giving me more because of where my ancestors are from. I think that is motivation. It is very dangerous. It has always been a problem in other countries where we have affirmative action.

I mentioned before Thomas Sowell wrote a book about affirmative action, an older book today, but it is as fresh today as when he originally wrote it. In it he talks about when governments don't treat people equally but when they are supposed to pick between different groups, those countries break down.

I have always felt one of the problems with Canada getting together a decent government is, of course, they are divided by language. They have got a French part of Canada and English parts of Canada, but there are other areas in which outright civil war breaks out.

In Nigeria, where you have different ethnic groups, different religions, Muslim in the north, Christian in the south, they have always had problems. I remember when I was in high school, there was a war over Biafra in which there tried to be a breakaway in Nigeria, and to a certain extent, the hard feelings in Nigeria were encouraged by affirmative action sort of programs.

Same thing in Sri Lanka, a country before they had affirmative action, they had different ethnic groups. They got along fabulously. Once the idea got in there that the government should pick and choose people based on their ethnicity, they had a civil war, and for a relatively tiny country, over 30,000 people died.

India, one of the difficult things that these incredibly smart and resourceful people have had in getting together a good country is it is divided between dozens of ethnic groups, certainly there is a big religious divide between Hindu and Muslim, and that has really hampered India. They are trying to deal with it. They sometimes deal with it through affirmative action programs and, of course, that just increases the

hard feelings they have in that country.

Same thing is true with Malaysia, another country. They have to deal with the Chinese and the native Malays and only results in trouble and hard feelings when we go down this affirmative action path.

There are other areas, for whatever reason, in society, even without prompting from the government in which we are judging people where their ancestors came from. There is a good book out there right now by Heather McDonald talking about efforts being made to get rid of standardized testing to get into medical school.

Well, I had always thought that the smartest kids are the ones who became doctors, but it seems some of these bean counters don't like that. They would rather focus on where people's ancestors came from rather than how good you do on the standardized tests.

As a result, there are medical schools which are getting rid of standardized tests altogether. So we are no longer getting the smartest kids to be doctors, or in some medical schools we aren't. Instead, we wind up with kids getting into medical school in part based on an essay, maybe the more woke the essay the better. But, again, this idea about judging people by their ancestry is not only going to be unfair to people, but it is going to result in doctors who are no longer the best in their class. It is going to be doctors who filled out the essay the most or who did the most volunteer work or something and it is inevitably going to result in the decline of the quality of American medicine.

Just like as we push more affirmative action in American manufacturing, push it more in important Federal jobs, push it more in the judiciary instead of just merit, we are going to wind up with a less competent judiciary, less competent manufacturing firms, less competent professors, and will result in decline in America. I do believe it is being pushed by the same people who are pushing our welfare state, the same people who are for unfettered immigration, the same people who are trying to destroy the nuclear family, the same people who are trying to blur the differences between the sexes, and each one of these things is a march toward destroying America from within as Nikita Khrushchev warned us and promised us 50 years ago.

I encourage our negotiators, when it comes time to negotiate the appropriation bills, to take out the provisions that Joe Biden has to increase the amount of racial enmity around the country. I encourage the colleges and universities around the country to not fall for this idea that people's identity is based on where their ancestors came from many years ago.

I mean, think of this: I can grow up next to a Cuban family. I can have my best friend be the son of a Cuban family. We can go to the same schools together. We can play on the same basketball team together, but somehow these bean counters say you are all such different people because your great great-grandparents lived in Cuba and your great great-grand parents lived in Germany.

We see such a diverse group of people. We encourage our negotiators to take that out. We encourage the benefactors of the universities around the country to not allow this to happen there. We encourage people to get rid of these affirmative action programs.

One other way, by the way, that they hurt America is they encourage what I think of as lying. I ran into a guy recently from my district who had a business--and he knew a lot of other people in a similar business--who had their wives named as the owner of the company. They lied. My friend, a good honest Christian, wasn't going to lie and pretend that his wife owned the company, so he didn't get the advantage of this.

Mr. Speaker, those are my requests--things that the American press corps should be paying attention to but aren't.

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

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Education and the Workforce be permitted to file its report to accompany H.J. Res. 45 at any time today, May 18, 2023.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 12 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 22, 2023, at noon for morning-hour debate.