Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to call up H.R. 471, the PAUSE Act, to protect all Americans from Biden's border crisis.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to educate my colleagues and the public one more time as to what sort of disaster we are soon to have on the southern border.

Recently, we have had frequently 90,000 to 100,000 people cross the border every month. People of whom we know little. People are skipping to the head of the line over people who want to come here legally, people that come from countries that are hostile to us.

But as bad as it is to have 80,000 to 100,000 people come across, the Biden administration is claiming that within the next month and a half they will remove title 42, opening up the border to perhaps another 200,000 or 300,000 or 400,000 people a month above what we are already getting here.

I personally think they are doing this because the Ukraine war is going on, and they think they can really land a death blow to the future of this country by opening up the border to people all over the world.

I call upon American citizens and my colleagues to not forget about what is going on at the border. I call upon the press to treat this story with the gravity it should be given and to report on all the people who are going to come here in the second half of May.

We cannot have 400,000 people a month coming across the border.

Mr. Speaker, our country is obviously in bad shape, and I think our forefathers, if they saw the way we operated today, would be quite stunned and wonder where in their Constitution they let us down to wind up where we are today.

I think of the three branches of government. The judiciary is the one which right now has let down the Framers the most. Our forefathers realized that a country with elections usually eventually fails because the majority can either want, or be manipulated into wanting, more stuff, or ordering other people around to order them to be obeyed the way they would like other people to be behaved.

The Bill of Rights is almost exclusively about restricting the role of government in American life. Obviously, the Supreme Court has largely abandoned that function. Things got bad in the 1930s and 1940s, and again in the 1960s. Today, one wonders what the Court will ever say no to.

Where will Judge Jackson fit as we try to defend our Constitution? We look at her inability to say what a woman is and her inability to talk about judicial philosophy, and we know where she will stand. She stands with woke America. I hate that word, but that is what it is. It is somebody who has no respect for tradition. If you have no respect for tradition or common sense, you certainly don't have that near reverence, which should be a requirement for any Supreme Court Justice.

Furthermore, President Biden got himself in a position in which he said he is going to have to promote a Black woman to that position. The very idea that you think decisions on a court should vary with the background of the person who is on that court shows you don't have that respect for the Constitution.

All Americans should have an originalist view of the Constitution and consider it the great, almost God-given, document that it is.

In any event, when you don't have that respect for the Constitution, you know you are not going to respect the Second Amendment. You are not going to respect the 10th Amendment; it is a disaster we have ignored it. You are going to continue to stretch the Commerce Clause all out of whack. You are going to look at every individual as a member of a group, never as an individual in their own right.

Right now, about 2 percent of the lawyers in the country are Black women. So, what Joe Biden did is he took 98 percent of the possible resumes for this very important job and threw them in the garbage.

I wonder if President Biden does that anywhere else in his life? Does he throw away 98 percent of the resumes or potential resumes when he is looking for a new dentist, a new plumber, a new clergyman, throw out 98 percent willy-nilly? That is what he has done in picking a new Supreme Court Justice who could well be on the Court for the next 40 years.

Our forefathers felt that by giving us this Constitution--they pointed out that this Constitution is fit for moral and religious people and not fit for anyone else. Will Judge Jackson respect that? I don't know.

When they finished the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin said: We are giving you a republic, if you can keep it.

We are, right now, being tested whether we are the moral and religious people that can keep the republic that the forefathers felt they described in the Constitution.

It looks to me, from everything you hear about her, that Judge Jackson is not going to have that reverence to keep that Constitution, to keep that republic. We will, therefore, with judges like that, wind up collapsing.

Madam Speaker, I hereby remove my name as cosponsor of

Madam Speaker, America has to realize we are on the precipice of making one of the most significant precedential determinations in recent memory, and that is the removal of Title 42 affecting American immigration law.

Already we are allowing--depending on the month--between 80,000 and 100,000 people to cross our border who are not appropriately vetted.

However, due to a title put in effect by President Trump, we are keeping another perhaps 400,000 people a month--we are told 18,000 a day--south of the border out of concern that they will bring the virus in this country.

If this title is removed, we will go--according to current estimates--to 18,000 people a day: a half a million people a month coming in this country. That is an intolerable amount. They are people we cannot support. They are people who have not been appropriately vetted. And, obviously, there will be a massive increase in illegal drugs crossing our southern border.

I beg the American public to wake up and do what you can to make it clear

to everybody in this body that we do not need a massive increase over the already intolerable 80,000 to 90,000 people who are coming here every month unvetted.

Madam Speaker, I have to make a plane, so I won't be here for the whole 30 minutes. It will be probably more like 15 minutes.

Before addressing the issues I wanted to talk about today, I want to one more time talk a little bit about vitamin D, because earlier today I talked to Dr. Amiez Dror from Israel about a study that he conducted.

The study is absolutely amazing. In Israel about 45 percent of the population is vitamin D deficient, and that is really deficient. By deficient, they mean less than 20 nanograms per milliliter. About 75 percent of the Israeli population has vitamin D less than 30 milligrams per nanoliter.

In any event, it wasn't a huge study, but he looked to see how people who had adequate levels of vitamin D performed once they came into the medical system compared to people who were under that 20 nanograms. He found people who were vitamin D deficient, which is almost half the Israeli population, were 14 times more likely to have severe or critical COVID than the people who were above 20 nanograms per milliliter.

As far as people who died, 25 percent of the people who were hospitalized and were vitamin D deficient died compared to only 2.3 percent of those who had adequate vitamin D.

Think about that. You are 11 times more likely to die, Madam Speaker, if you are vitamin D deficient.

When he looked at adequate prelevel hospitalization for vitamin D, it was a better predictor of how you would turn out than having COPD, having diabetes, or having congestive heart failure. Unbelievable what a great predictor it was.

Nevertheless, continued our kind of asleep public health establishment has still not talked about this like they could have. We recently went over 1 million deaths in the United States attributed to COVID, but we can't talk about the fact that--and he is not the only doctor who feels that way--you could have cut that number in half or maybe well time more than half, if out of the chute well before we had such things as vaccines, we knew about vitamin D being good for people back in April or May of 2020.

If they had spent some of these advertising dollars they spent on other things en masse or whatever, they could have, I believe, saved half the lives. I right now personally know nine people who have died of COVID, and I can't help but think how many of these people or which of those people would have survived if they had publicized the importance of taking vitamin D.

Now, of course, I also asked the doctor how much vitamin D you should take. He felt for people in good shape it would be 2,000 to 3,000 international units.

If you are overweight, because the fat cells absorb the vitamin D, you should take more, maybe 4,000 or more international units.

He points out that even if you are in the sun, one of the things that creates so many people in Israel to be vitamin D deficient is--as the United States--so many people take sunscreen. It is important to protect yourself from skin cancer, but you have to remember, if you are one of these people who put sunscreen all over yourself, even in a sunny climate, you are not going to get adequate vitamin D levels.

He is a very important doctor. He has a Ph.D. in genetics. He is also a medical doctor. He also has degrees in molecular biology. So you are talking about a real sharp guy here.

If we had an on-the-ball press corps paying attention today, they should give him a call in Israel. He loves to talk to people about this, and you could get something that is very important in your local newspapers.

If anybody connected to the public health establishment is hearing this speech, they should give my office a call. We will give them the contact information.

It would have been better if this sort of stuff were out there 2 years ago, but the COVID infection rate goes up and down. We are on a downswing right now, though we are not as low as we were last July.

Vitamin D helps prevent other diseases as well. I realize a lot of the medical establishment in the United States does not like to focus on things in which people don't make a lot of money. But for people who want to save lives, there is still time to get the story of vitamin D out there. I certainly think every major and minor newspaper in the United States should be covering it.

He happened to mention that he got something in the New York Post, but it should be in more than just the New York Post.

Right now, we have our President, who I watched a little bit yesterday,

focusing on Transgender Day, saying how important it is we talk about transgenders to first and second graders. I can't believe that is where we are as a country. That is what President Biden felt was important to talk about.

I am going to talk about some other issues, some suggestions that President Biden might want to adapt to something he could talk about a little bit more.

I continue to believe the border is the biggest crisis America faces today. In February, we let about 72,000 people, including got-aways, into the country. ICE also releases people into the interior.

Right now, the administration does not release those numbers, so we will say 70,000 on the low side. That was this past February. Two years ago, well under 20,000 were being let in, in February. We are in a situation right now where about four times as many people per month are coming into the country.

I will point out, we are not always getting the best. The last time I was down there, I walked down a path that the people coming here illegally walked down. It was littered with photo IDs being thrown away from Chile, Brazil, Colombia, wherever.

But we are about to have the situation become much, much worse. We are about to get rid of what we refer to as title 42. That means that people who are coming here will no longer be held up because of the COVID threat.

There is a concern that the number of people coming here will be about 18,000 a day being let in, or 500,000 a month.

I think we have the biggest crisis in this country, allowing 70,000 people who are unvetted come into this country. We are about to go from 70,000 to half a million a month, and our President is focusing on: Are we doing enough to educate second graders about transgenders?

I would hope the press corps would drill him on these questions again and again: Who is going to pay for these people? How is it fair for the people who are trying to come into this country appropriately? What are you going to do about people who are coming here who perhaps are breaking the law?

I haven't touched on the fact that while we are focusing right now on people coming into the country, we are now having a fraction as many people being deported as we were before. That is another problem that we have to address.

In any event, I hope the press zeros in, when they have a chance to talk to President Biden, on what he is going to do since his own administration is estimating 18,000 people a day are going to come here.

Other things he is doing to encourage people to come here: We know, in the Build Back Better bill he was promoting, he was trying to get people who come here illegally to get free college. We know, as a practical matter, when you come here, if you are sick, we take you to the hospital. You will get free healthcare. I think probably virtually every State in the country--certainly, in Wisconsin--if you are ill and show up at the emergency room, they will treat you. So, you are getting free healthcare, perhaps free college.

It is just a disaster. It is the end of America. They talk right now about this happening the second half of May. America has to look out. Like I said, we are heading toward the point where we could have as many as half a million people a month coming here--the end of America.

The other crisis that we should be looking at--not quite as important as the border but close--is the amount of inflation.

We had President Biden show us his new budget. In that new budget, we are talking about a 12 percent increase in nondiscretionary spending. It is not rocket science as to where this inflation is coming from. When you spend money excessively, and the Federal Reserve has to print money, you are going to get inflation.

I had naively hoped, at the beginning of the year, after the huge, excessive spending the last 2 years, that Republicans and Democrats would get together and hold discretionary spending to even. Of course, mandatory spending is going to go up anyway as the population ages-- more money spent on Medicare, more money spent on Social Security. But, no, I didn't get my wish of zero percent increase.

A 12 percent increase in nondefense discretionary, what does that mean? It means we are going to continue to have the Fed print more and more money.

We have a graph here to look at. It shows the year-over-year increase in M2, one measure of the amount of money in the system, which directly leads to inflation.

Looking at the 1970s--and I was alive in the 1970s--there might have been a 7 percent increase, year over year, in the size of the monetary supply. Look where we are right now. We are just short of a 40 percent increase.

Look at where we are now compared to the 1970s and how difficult it was to get that inflation out of the system in the late 1970s and particularly the early 1980s. It really did take a real economic downturn to make the dollar have any value again. That is what it took in the 1980s, if you remember that downturn, that recession. Can you imagine how difficult it is going to be to give the dollar adequate value again?

Not only that, as I look in that budget, it is a divisive budget. One more time, we have program after program aimed at certain groups, not all Americans across the board, as our forefathers would want.

When I go back home, I talk to a restauranteur. He has a little restaurant. He has his chin up. He doesn't want to be publicized. He felt, during the COVID stuff, he was denied a $30,000 grant because of his race. He is a White guy.

This is the type of thing that page after page after page of this proposed budget throws out. Again, we have to focus on some people rather than other people, which is one of the reasons why I do feel, in addition to his incompetence at the border, in addition to his incompetence with regard to inflation, in addition to the fact that I think he has done a bad job on COVID, as illustrated by the fact that he has been there well over a year and still they haven't adequately publicized vitamin D--President Trump should have been doing that as well, quite frankly.

Despite all of these other problems, he for sure has become a divisive President, trying to lower the opinion of the police by saying that they are racist.

In any event, these are the things that we should be focusing on right now.

I must leave in a second due to a flight, but I will make one more comment on Ukraine. It is my belief, talking to other Congressmen in this Chamber, as well as talking to people in the Biden administration, that they are not adequately preparing for the end of the Ukraine war. The longer the war goes on, the more people die, the more both the Ukrainian and Russian economies are shattered. If you look at all the bombs going off in Ukraine, you can imagine how long it is going to take to rebuild that country.

Therefore, it should be obvious that, like any war, eventually, an armistice is going to be signed, and an agreement is going to be met. I don't think enough exercise, enough time, is being put into bringing both sides to the table and working toward an agreement. As soon as an agreement is reached, it will benefit both of these countries as well as the rest of the world.

I strongly encourage the Biden administration to see what they can do. I appreciate what France has done, and I appreciate what Israel has done, trying to broker a deal.

There was a time when the United States was the world leader--I still like to think we are the world leader--in which we would get involved in brokering a deal, certainly brokering a deal before this whole war gets so out of line that it begins to affect the rest of the world as easily as it could if it would become a world war.

Like I said, every day that goes by, the more people die, the more equipment that is destroyed, it increases the chance that things will get out of line. So, I beg the Biden administration to exert a little bit of leadership toward trying to get this war to end.

We all wish the Ukrainians are doing well, but ultimately, an agreement will have to be signed.

I am all for helping Ukrainians. I have certainly voted for billions of dollars which will be used by that country. But I am sure the people there will be happy when the war is over.

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

Madam Speaker, it is a good-sounding bill. Everyone knows drug costs in general are too high, and insulin costs in particular are way too high. But it is a bill with a simple answer.

We look at a problem and solve the problem by having the Federal Reserve eventually print more money, $15.5 billion over 10 years.

I realize you feel you have a pay-for here, but it is just by delaying another program by another year. And as a practical matter, this bill spends $15.5 billion more over 10 years than we would without the bill.

We are already told this source of funds--we already used this type or source of funds in the infrastructure bill. It is just grabbing another year.

Why don't we just require PBMs to pass on their rebates to the patients as intended? That is something that would cost the Federal Government, in my mind, no new money. It would be a significant reduction in cost for the individual.

I appreciate that so many people on the majority side of the aisle would like to work together with us, and it shouldn't be difficult to find a solution to this problem that is fair to all concerned.

Madam Speaker, I rise to hope for peace in Ukraine.

Estimates vary, but perhaps over 20,000 people have died in this war already.

Recently, both President Biden and Senator Graham have weighed in on what they feel should happen to Vladimir Putin. Obviously, their language could delay the end of the war and heighten tensions at the peace talks.

Have they cleared their comments with the Ukrainian people, who lose more people every day the war goes on?

Both President Biden and Senator Graham got press from these remarks, and some politicians just care about that.

I encourage all Senators and the President of the United States to remember that they are in the big leagues now, and their careless remarks to get a little bit more press can cost Ukrainian and Russian lives.

Madam Speaker, I would like to comment a little bit on some of the issues that have been out there this week, issues that are important issues but about which, for whatever reason, I don't think the public has been adequately informed as to what is going on.

The first issue I would like to talk about concerns the bill yesterday regarding trade relations with Russia and an earlier bill with regard to oil exports from Russia, and that is an incredibly important provision in that bill that has not been discussed in the mainstream media, which is an amendment of something called the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Today, before that bill is signed, the U.S. President can sanction foreign leaders or, I guess, pretty much any foreign person, certainly any foreign elected official, if they violated any human rights, and the definition of human rights is fairly narrowly defined.

When we think of horrible foreign leaders, we think of murder. We think of kidnapping. We think of holding people without trial for excessive periods of time. And we think if somebody is going to be sanctioned, they should be responsible for those human rights abuses.

In this bill, we change the definition of human rights to be open- ended, whatever the President thinks human rights are. Furthermore, we allow sanctioning of people who are indirectly responsible for violating human rights.

Already, the United States weighs in when countries try to preserve laws that were the laws of the United States not long ago, and I will say this with regard to two areas, the LGBTQ agenda and abortion.

Already, when you talk to people from Eastern Europe; the Caribbean; the Dominican Republic, in particular; Central and South America, people are mad because the United States throws around its substantial economic weight to fight the Christian beliefs of these countries.

Now, if these bills were signed to become law, if the Senate does not amend them, the President will have a new tool in his toolbox if he wants to force other countries to adopt the views of abortion and the views of LGBTQ that are the views, quite frankly, of the leftwing of the Democratic Party.

The President will be able to threaten the parliaments or, for all I know, lobbyists and demonstrators in foreign countries by saying: You can't get a visa to the United States because we don't like your stand on abortion. We don't like your stand on LGBTQ.

They can take assets in the United States. And we are told this was something that was threatened, at least the visa thing was threatened, with regard to elected officials in the Dominican Republic.

If you don't follow the U.S. party line, you are not going to get a visa to the United States. We are going to take your assets in the United States, take your bank accounts.

John Adams said that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious country. This is kind of going the opposite way.

We hold contempt with people, religious people, and say that we are going to weigh in with all the gifts we have been given, the financial gifts we have been given. We are going to weigh in as a country and say that we are going to use those assets to punish foreign leaders who had Christian beliefs that not so long ago were held by the vast majority of Americans.

I hope the press reports on this latest power grab of the President. I hope the public wakes up and makes sure that when these bills come back from the Senate--and that is to say, bills with regard to trade, bills with regard to oil--that they do not include this great, increased power of the President to punish, quite frankly, Christian countries.

I don't think that has been adequately addressed, and I think in most newspapers articles, it wasn't addressed at all.

Now, I will address something else. I am going to talk a little bit about inflation. A lot has been said about inflation recently, and a lot of it focuses on the price of gas, but there is high inflation everywhere.

I have a very large manufacturing district. I tour my manufacturers all the time. It is not unusual to find manufacturers whose costs for metals were up 400 or 500 percent well before there was an invasion of Ukraine.

Every manufacturer I talk to tells me that they expect big inflation in the next year. Again, that was before the invasion.

I want to draw your attention to the graph here of the M2 monetary supply, and you can look. We begin down around 1970, 1965, the amount year over year that the monetary supply goes up. It sometimes goes up 6 or 7 percent per year.

Those were in the bad old days of the 1970s and the inflation that kind of hit its peak during Jimmy Carter.

It kind of went up and down, and we went through a lot of years in which inflation was relatively low historically, 1 or 2 percent.

Then, you look in the last couple of years, and some of this was due to overspending on COVID. But, more recently, we also have the American Rescue Plan in which apparently financial literates felt the way to benefit the economy was to have the Federal Reserve print as much money as it can.

Now, look at this graph. Look at what an aberration we are in at this time where the money supply is going up year over year, over 35 percent.

I mean, you don't need to be a Ph.D. in economics to know what is going to happen. The cost of everything is going to go through the roof, oil being one of those things that is going to go through the roof, and the cost of food, the cost of any manufactured goods.

I talk to farmers in my district. The cost of fertilizer, the cost of any other chemicals--through the roof. They are going to have to pass that on.

Before you say that this inflation had anything to do with Ukraine, look at what the M2 money supply was like even before Ukraine.

This is such an aberration from anything else we have experienced in the United States, and it comes from people who have convinced themselves that you can spend unlimited on anything, and there is no cost to pay.

I hope that the press in this country gets ahold of a graph like this and gives it to the American people so they can see where we are and why the cost of everything is through the roof.

I really think the value of the dollar, not only in the last couple of months but over the next few years, is going to go downhill like nothing we have ever seen before.

I think since we switched to the Federal Reserve system in whatever it was, 1916, 1917, we are now in uncharted territory.

Some people say that we should never have paper money because Congress won't be able to risk destroying the value of the Nation's currency. Well, it hasn't happened until now, but wow.

As amazing as it is, as horrible as these numbers are, the majority party talks about still trying to pass the Build Back Better bill that will make this go up even more rapidly.

So, I beg the press corps to pay attention to the monetary supply and connect the dots as to why we have such inflation.

Issues at the Southern Border

Now, there is another issue that is going on, and I think to a certain extent because of Ukraine it has been pushed into the background, but it is still a vitally important issue, and that is what is going on at the border. Just because Kamala Harris has been appointed the Border Patrol czar, and she does absolutely

nothing as far as we can tell, and it doesn't mean we should stop talking about this huge tragedy.

In February, we had 165,000 encounters with the Border Patrol, up 63 percent over last year. There were about 72,000 people let into the country, and the figures aren't out there, but they can guess that ICE let in another 19,000 more. Of that amount, 9,000 were unaccompanied minors.

If an unaccompanied minor shows up at the southern border, we don't turn them back to their parents. They usually write an address on their T-shirt, and we send them off to their aunt or uncle, whoever, you know, it could be just a friend, whatever, and that is just par for the course. We pay to put the little child on the airplane, we pay to ship them somewhere; maybe not their parents, maybe just friends or whatever. If you want to talk about divided families or breaking up families, you look at the current system where every month 9,000 kids who are younger than age 18 are let in this country without their parents.

I had a staffer go down there because we had to work late last week, but I will be down there next week. And there were some other observations I made as far as what it is like on the border. Gangs play music on the Mexican side of the border as people march across. It is a festive atmosphere. Nobody even pretends that the United States cares about what is going on at their border.

The drug gangs make $3 billion a year, we believe, transporting people here. The charges are between $2,000 and $20,000 to come here because they run that border.

It is not in just our Vice President where we have a lack of leadership. The California Highway Patrol can't report illegals they find to ICE because of the, I would almost call it, treasonous behavior of one of our States. Increasingly, we are getting people coming here who not only do they not speak Spanish, they speak an indigenous language from southern Mexico or, more likely, from Central America. They are obviously very difficult to process, and you have to wonder about the wisdom of letting people in this country when nobody can speak their language.

We are getting people from Iran, Iraq, and Uzbekistan, which of course are breeding grounds for terrorism. These people are paying up to $20,000 a head to come into this country. Doesn't that concern anybody?

The hotels, the airlines in Mexico obviously know this is going on because people take airlines from, for example, Cancun to Mexicali. We know hotels south of the border are being used by illegal immigrants, but because it is becoming so common, it is built into the Mexican economy.

Obviously, when we do so little to prevent this illegal immigration, morale from the Border Patrol is low. How would you like it if you are taking a job--and recently they have even been shot at--taking a dangerous job like that and getting as little support from the executive branch as you can imagine?

Actually, I did notice in the recent appropriations bill that passed last week, we are putting a lot more money into monitoring the Border Patrol and making sure they are not mistreating people. It is not a big concern for us apparently when an illegal immigrant shoots at a Border Patrol agent, but we have to put millions of dollars more into the budget to make sure the Border Patrol is not breaking the law. No wonder the Border Patrol does not feel good about their situation right now.

I will give you another example of the brazenness of the illegals coming here. Right now, migrants aren't afraid to call 911 and get escorted with a ride to where they want to go, and we just taxi them in. If they are kind of wandering around, let's make a 911 call, and they show up. Nothing wrong with them, no healthcare problem, we just use our local emergency services as an escort service.

We still have a situation in which people don't have to be tested for COVID. Okay. But it is kind of strange that American citizens, say if you work for a hospital, are required to get a vaccine, and we don't even test you if you are trying to come in this country. What are the priorities here?

People coming in from what we call special-interest countries are going up, be it Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, countries like this.

So, in any event, I encourage the press, and that encourages the so- called conservative press, or the balanced press, to report to America when we are having 80,000 or 90,000 people cross the border every month, report what type of people are coming here, report on the mass decrease in the number of deportations, as even people who have committed crimes are removed at a much lower rate than they were by Donald Trump. Because I do think if we look back at America 10 years from now and say, how did the policies of 2022 affect America, still the number one most damaging thing is that we ignored our border.

I will point out one more thing about ignoring the border. Right now, we do have a crisis in Ukraine. Hopefully, we are not going to have a similar crisis in Taiwan. I have felt all along that an effect of not enforcing our border is to tell foreign leaders who don't like us that we have kind of a wimpy, ineffective, incompetent government in charge right now.

Other normal countries do not let 90,000 to 100,000 people a month cross into their country, and leaders around the world look at that, and they, quite frankly, think that the current executive branch of this country is not a serious elected official, and they challenge somebody who is not a serious elected official.

There is no doubt in my mind that if we had been enforcing that border and taking a tougher stance in other places around the world, we wouldn't be in this mess in Ukraine like we are today.

Issues Surrounding COVID

Madam Speaker, the next issue that I think has disappeared a little bit is with regard to COVID. We are now in a dip in new people getting COVID, but I think in the last week we are still around 5,000 people who died of COVID. I think the last four people I have known who have died of COVID really haven't had a lot else wrong with them, maybe nothing else wrong with them. I think there are a couple of things that have been underreported or not focused on.

I have railed for almost 2 years here now on vitamin D. There was a study out of Israel that was released fairly recently that said that if you were deficient in vitamin D--and in the study they say deficient being 20 nanograms per milligram, which is pretty deficient--that you would be 11 times more likely to die of COVID.

Now, given all the massive amount of ink--if they still use ink--and the massive amount of time that has been spent educating the public on how to avoid COVID or avoid dying from COVID, I would think a little bit more time would be spent by the public health establishment looking at the effects of vitamin D.

You are 11 times more likely to die if you are under 20 nanograms. What can we do about that? First of all, it ought to be publicized. Secondly, it should be par for the course that, particularly if you are older and you go in for a checkup, that your doctor gives you a vitamin D test. Right now, your reimbursement levels for that test may not be quite up for the cost.

We all know that the medical establishment in America today, particularly the hospitals, are obsessed with money. But people are dying out there. If you test somebody for vitamin D, and they are down around 15 or 17 nanograms, you can alert that person and perhaps save a life. There are all sorts of people walking around with insufficient vitamin D levels. They don't even know it. They don't know the importance of it.

I will also point out that they should especially point out the value of vitamin D to people of color. We know people of color are more likely to have low levels of vitamin D, and therefore the incompetence or the failure of the public health establishment not to educate people on vitamin D has disproportionately affected people of color.

They talk about people of color a lot in this institution, and I think a lot of times they talk about prejudice that is not there. But here you have something in which people are dying overwhelmingly, and for whatever reason, the public health establishment does not ring the alarm as far as how much darker skin increases the possibility that you are going to get serious COVID. So I beg the CDC and the public health establishment to focus a little bit more on vitamin D.

I will also point out that different doctors have different opinions as to how you should treat somebody for COVID, and I have no problem finding doctors who find that drugs like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine given early will save lives, and a lot of times those same doctors feel a drug called remdesivir is not effective.

Now, I don't think the subcommittee that we have had here has studied that enough. But with remdesivir, apparently the hospitals--and this is largely the drug companies getting the money--you are going to get billed out over $3,000 a day for the treatment, and the treatment for ivermectin is nominal.

I talk to doctors, smart doctors, doctors that are well published, who tell me that they could have saved tens of thousands, maybe over 100,000 lives if doctors could give the off-label drugs that were originally prescribed for another purpose, but the doctors aren't allowed to by the hospitals that they work for.

This is a potential scandal. I would think normally the press would be a little bit inquisitive when we say one drug is worth $3,200 a day and one drug is under $50 a day, and smart doctors feel the drug for $50 a day or under $50 a day is more effective. But for whatever reason we don't talk about it. If something wrong is going on around here, the reason they are able to get away with things going on is because the press doesn't highlight it.

The reason why hospitals are not giving drugs that some doctors feel are more effective are directives from the NIH. And, again, I think drug companies have too much power in this town, but it is something that should be looked into by the media. It surprises me that some people still aren't aware of this.

Conflicts Between Russia and Ukraine

The final thing that we will focus on here a little bit is what is going on in Ukraine. I still feel that for whatever reason, and I have talked about it here, we have not done enough to discuss the Holodomor. The Holodomor was the starvation of 4 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s by the Communist government.

At the time, it was underreported in the United States because at that time, for reasons unknown to me--I wasn't around at the time, it is a mystery to me today--The New York Times is perceived to be the paper of record. And The New York Times, a guy by the name of Walter Duranty decided not to talk about the starvation. He decided to keep it secret. Probably because at the time the intellectuals, the type of people who work at the big newspapers, liked to look upon the left favorably, and because it was Communists who were starving people, it is not something they like to talk about.

I do not know how you can intelligently talk about the relationships between Ukraine and Russia without talking about the 4 million--and that is the lowest, by the way, other people talk about 15 million-- without talking about the 4 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by the Communist, Marxist government that ran the Soviet Union at that time.

I would again ask that our press run special features on the starvation that took place 90 years ago. First of all, when 4 million people are starved, it should be something every American school child knows about anyway; but secondly, when you look at the animosity of the Ukrainians toward the Russians, that certainly plays a big role. I have a sneaking suspicion the reason we don't talk about it is because it is one more embarrassment to the atheistic, totalitarian left that some powerful people in this country like to look up to. So again, I wish that the newspapers would cover the Holodomor, and I wish that the schools would cover it because no school child should be able to graduate from high school without knowing about this.

And it is also important so they can be on the lookout for big government atheists, wherever they are. I think you also have to know about what the big government atheists did to understand why we fought in Korea, to see why we fought in Vietnam.

But America's school children, quite frankly, well older than school children, are blissfully ignorant of the Holodomor and what can happen if you let a bunch of atheistic big-government types take over the government.

The final thing that I am going to focus on here a little bit, I have before thanked President Biden for giving the State of the Union speech and not talking about racism. But I still think one of the problems we have with high crime in this country--and my district borders the city of Milwaukee. The city of Milwaukee, for the second time last year, had the highest murder rate they have ever had.

When I was a child, the city of Milwaukee was the safest of the 25 biggest cities in the country. But we have gone downhill. And I think a lot of that is the police have been beat up; they are called racists, and they are afraid to do their job. They are afraid of having a complaint filed against them. We still have a bill floating around Congress saying it should be easier to sue police. And, as a result, we do get these high murder rates.

In addition to the high murder rates, we have, together with our lax policy at the border, 100,000 people dying every year from drug overdoses. But, again, it was 45,000 7 years ago. That was high. And I think whether it is 45,000 or 100,000, people's eyes glaze over. If it was your child, if it was your sibling who died of a drug overdose, maybe your eyes wouldn't glaze over. But the media in this country, their eyes have glazed over, and we continue to let people die.

So, in conclusion, in any event, my final ask here is that President Biden, who has done what he can to fan the flames of saying police are racist, police are racist, I think it would do a lot toward making it easier to hire police around the country and easier to be an effective policeman if he would publicly apologize to the police of this country for his slandering them and his compatriots slandering them, and tell them what a good job they are doing.

So those are some of the issues that I hoped the press would pick up on.

In conclusion, I will make one more comment with regard to Ukraine. This is a disaster for Ukraine. It is just a horrible thing. We all feel so good about how brave they are; about the fight they have put up.

Eventually, that war has got to end, and I never feel, when I am dealing with members of this administration, or Congress, in general, quite frankly, that there is enough focus on ending the war.

There are newspaper reports saying that Israel might be getting involved in trying to negotiate an end. But the United States is still the most important powerful country in the world. And I wish the administration would take a little bit more time negotiating, trying to negotiate an end to that conflict.

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

Suspending normal trade relations with Russia is important. It is my belief 20 years from now the part of this bill that will most be remembered is the change in the Magnitsky Act, which is normally used to sanction foreign elected officials.

Right now, the Magnitsky Act can be used only for defined crimes, extrajudicial killings, torture, prolonged detention without trial. We are now opening up that act to unlimited human rights, however defined, including sanctioning people, for example, not following the LGBTQ agenda, or not being sufficiently pro-abortion.

We have heard before this country weighing in on countries like the Dominican Republic, Hungary, African and Latin American countries, using our economic might to punish them when they don't adopt our view or I'd say the liberal view of Christianity.

It is with great disappointment that people held out and risked whether this

bill would go ahead or not on changing the Magnitsky Act.

Madam Speaker, tomorrow, we are going to be addressed by the head of state from Ukraine.

I have been talking to people--young people, students, older people-- about if they know the background between those countries, specifically the Holodomor, a starvation of the Ukrainian people that took place in 1932 and 1933.

I am shocked. I bet less than 10 percent of Americans know that 4 million--4 to 15 million, but at least 4 million--Ukrainians were starved to death by the Communist government in the early 1930s.

Even less, I am sure, know that for misreporting this starvation, a guy by the name of Walter Duranty, from The New York Times, received a Pulitzer Prize for covering it up. So, this leftwing bias out of The New York Times is not something that started today. They, of course, hated the people who were starved because they were independent farmers, and the Communist Party hates independent, family-oriented people.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss a few topics which should be of interest to all Americans.

Obviously, many Americans have been glued to their TVs this week to see what is happening in Ukraine and what is going on with the Russians and the way they are treating the Ukrainian people.

I would like to emphasize one more time that it amazes me the journalists of this country and the politicians of this country can talk about the two countries, Russia and Ukraine, without talking about the Holodomor.

I have asked children, college students, law enforcement officers, journalists. Amazingly, they have gone through 8 or 12 or 16 years of schooling and don't know what it is.

The Holodomor took place in 1932 to 1933 when communism had in the last few years taken over Russia and taken over Ukraine. Of course, communists, above all, hate freedom. I don't know if you could describe Russia's communists today--maybe a little more fascist than communist. But at the time, there was no question it was communist, and they didn't like the fact that the farmers, called the kulaks, were, to a degree, free and independent. They were going to crack down on them by taking away their grain and making sure they would starve to death.

Now, perhaps because it has not been adequately studied, we don't know how many people were killed by the Communist Party in Ukraine during the years 1932 to 1933, but if you peruse the internet, it is somewhere between 3 and 17 million.

Interestingly, at the same time these people were starving, the person The New York Times put on the case was a guy by the name of Walter Duranty, who they have since admitted they recognized he had some significant flaws in his study, but he managed not to report the starvation. The readers of The New York Times at that time thought that things were going great in the Soviet Union and that this might well be the wave of the future.

This is what happens when we have people, progressives, whatever you want to call them, who are blind to the inevitable, horrible things that happen when you let the hardcore left, or what I would call the atheistic totalitarian left, take over a country.

I would hope, as we talk about Ukraine and Russia, that our media outlets, be it newspaper or otherwise, use this as an opportunity to educate the American public as to how many millions of people starved to death during this time.

Every New York Times employee should have to listen to this show upon employment about what happened and about what the readers of The New York Times were not told about during these years. Every journalism major should spend a few classes when they begin journalism school on this topic. No American schoolchild should graduate eighth grade without hearing about the Holodomor.

Not only is it a warning for what happens when we let the hardcore left take over, but I don't know how you can understand American history, the last 80 years, unless you know a little bit more about communism.

How can American children know why we fought in Korea? How could American children know why we fought in Vietnam? How will American children know what we had a Cold War over?

I don't understand how you can talk about Ukraine and Russia without hearing about the first Ukrainian experiences with communism. It is the reason why some people like me are so befuddled why Senator Blumenthal is given kind of a free pass when he shows up at a communist anniversary. It is why people like me find it so offensive that two of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter were Marxists and that organization is treated with respect.

This is why I am so concerned when we have owners of high-tech quasi- monopolies try to suppress information hostile to their progressive ideology. Just like in a hardcore leftist state, they would oppress the ability of the local people to find out views on all sorts of opinions. By the way, that is going on in the Soviet Union today.

We turn on the TV and we get all sorts of information about what is going on in the Ukraine. The average Russian citizen, whose children are dying in the Ukraine, they don't get to find out what is really going on. Some people call it Communist; some people call it Marxist. I don't think Progressive is exactly the same thing, but clearly Progressive is meant to be further left than Liberal.

I would hope that by the time this Ukrainian/Russian situation wraps up that American journalists make sure that everybody knows about the Holodomor.

Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to talk about in President Biden's annual speech, I think he got away--because of what happened in the Ukraine--without addressing some of the other problems that are, I think, unaddressed.

I am going to talk a little bit about inflation. I am not like my good buddy from Arizona with huge graphs, but I want people to look at this little graph that is on a topic that is normally considered boring: the money supply.

Here we have a graph showing the degree to which the money supply goes up year over year. You will notice the money supply, compared to historic levels, went up rather dramatically, sometimes over 6 percent in the 1970s. People like me are old enough to remember that that is when mortgages were 20 percent and inflation was so high.

If we look at this graph, we see that recently the money supply went up around 7 percent, then dropped down to almost nothing in the 1990s. It recently has hit a year over year increase of 40 percent. I would hope that President Biden realizes that one of the reasons costs have gone so far up might have something to do with this dramatic increase in the money supply. This is an amazing graph.

President Biden--understanding so much about business--has simply advised us the way to deal with inflation is to tell businessmen to cut costs. Well, I will tell you, my district has more manufacturing jobs than any other district in the country and it is also a big agriculture district.

When I had a couple weeks off in the past, I toured a lot of factories around my district. One of the things I heard, in addition to the huge labor shortage,

is the huge increase in the costs of production, particularly in metals. Aluminum is going through the roof. Metals are up 300, 400, 500 percent compared to a couple years ago.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask President Biden: How do you lower costs if the cost of metals that are going into your product are up 300 to 400 percent?

I mentioned I also have a big agriculture district, a lot of dairy, some corn, some potatoes. What do I get from the farmers? They are actually very concerned also about their costs of production: feed, fertilizer, chemicals. Again, it is all skyrocketing. It is not a matter of just telling businesses to cut their costs.

These are the reasons why inflation is so high and why our young people--who I worry about so much because they should be able to get on with their life, they should be able to build a new house, they should begin to be able to have children. I look at the costs that are necessary to live the American Dream.

Housing. Did you ever look at how much the price of a house has gone up the last 18 months? Apartments. Now, I realize the cost of apartments varies dramatically, but in my area you used to be able to get an apartment for $600, $700, $800 a month. Now apartments are being rented for $1,500 a month.

I don't know how the young people are going to be able to afford the American Dream unless politicians begin to realize that when you have these big spending programs and the Fed has to print dollars to pay for them, you are inevitably going to get inflation.

I beg President Biden and I beg the members of the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee that as we work towards the next budget, we try to hold down the level of spending. It wouldn't be too much to ask if we had year over year no increase in spending at all.

I beg President Biden and other members of his party not to push through another massive spending bill. They talk about a $3 trillion bill, and he still dreams of getting it through. If it is not a $3 trillion bill or if they get a $2 trillion or $1 trillion bill, it will further put the price of housing beyond reach of the young people in the country.

One of the reasons it is so tempting for politicians to just print more money is because then they can say: I don't know how this increase in prices got here. It is not my fault. Just tell the businessmen to cut costs. It is not a coincidence that we had a lot of inflation in the 1970s when M2 was going up significantly.

It is not going to be a coincidence when inflation continues to go up year after year as the business community and the agriculture community tells me it will. If politicians in Washington, in their path to reelection, decide that it means having the Federal Reserve print more money, let the costs go up, and then turn around and tell the American public: I don't know how this happened, tell the businessmen to cut costs. Please address inflation like the great concern it is.

Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to address that I don't feel was adequately addressed the other night is the way we treat police in the country.

President Biden tried to address spending on police. It is true that particularly in big cities with strong Democrat city councils, strong Democrat mayors, they have not treated the police well the last few years. I don't think President Biden addressed what I believe is the big reason why police have not been as effective in holding down the homicide rates compared to a few years ago.

I think the major reason is that cheap politicians are out there lying and telling the public that they are racist. They are saying we ought to sue them, they are saying that we ought to pass legislation here in which it will make it easy to sue them. You wind up in a situation where the police become passive.

As bad as the reduction in the number of police is, I think this constant harping on racism and the police and let's make it easier to sue them makes matters even worse. I want to commend President Biden, he didn't talk about racism on Tuesday night, and that was a great improvement from his inaugural speech where it was kind of like all racism, white supremacy, blah, blah, blah.

It would be nice if he would use the forum of the annual State of the Union address to apologize to the police of the country and educate the American public that the police, by and large in this Nation, are not racist. When you look at studies, and there are a variety of studies we can pull up here, a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that White police officers were less likely than police officers of color to shoot unarmed Black suspects, for example.

When you adjust, sadly, for violent crimes committed, again, you don't find this racism. In an effort to win the next election--and they had success in the last election--again and again politicians are tearing down police departments and threatening to have the police sued. It is not surprising when the police become very passive, knowing that if you arrest somebody you could get a complaint filed against you; knowing that if you have to handcuff somebody or tackle somebody that there are politicians out there that want you to be sued. It is not surprising if the police become passive.

In the big, urban city closest to my heart, Milwaukee, where I was born and where my district is right up against, 2 years ago we hit the all-time record by a mile in murders. I didn't think it could get any higher, but they broke the record again last year.

I know if you talk to the police--they won't say it publicly--but they aren't policing the way they could 10 years ago because they are afraid they might get in trouble, they might get complaints, they might get sued or whatever. They back off and a lot of people have paid for that backing off with their lives.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly wish President Biden would change his tune, stop pushing bills that make it easy to sue police, and above all, change the tone of discussion about policing in this country by admitting how un-racist the police are in this Nation and bring out more respect for them and allow police to not be afraid to do their job.

Mr. Speaker, the next issue that I would like to address--and I wish President Biden would have used his opportunity on Tuesday night to address--he mentioned COVID and COVID deaths go up and COVID deaths go down. We still have about 1,500 people a day dying of COVID. I have known four people, who I think were relatively healthy, who passed away in the last 4 months of COVID. We shouldn't forget about it.

There are some things I have talked about COVID, and for whatever reason the public health establishment--and I think to a degree the President does control the public health establishment--have not addressed vitamin D.

There were studies that came out of Israel this week that they should have advertisements on all over this country. Israel found that patients with a vitamin D deficiency--and I think a vitamin D deficiency was described under 30-nanograms per milliliter--were 14 times more likely to have a severe or critical case of COVID-19 than those people with sufficient vitamin D in their system.

The mortality rate for those who had insufficient vitamin D levels was over 25 percent compared to 2.3 percent. In other words, you were more than 12 times as likely to die of COVID if you didn't have adequate vitamin D in your system.

I don't know why the public health establishment won't talk about this more. I have been talking about it for almost 2 years now. I realize that you can get nice bottles of vitamin D for $15 or $20 at Walgreens or wherever, so nobody is going a make a lot of money on it. And certainly, there are a lot of ways people made a lot of money with COVID so far.

I do believe that if they pushed vitamin D--not everybody would believe the commercials and not everybody would follow through--but I think it is entirely possible that you would reduce the number of fatalities by one-half.

I asked President Biden to weigh in with his agencies and weigh in with the CDD or NIH, and have them educate the public on the huge potential savings in lives if Americans would have an adequate amount of vitamin D.

I don't like breaking out people of different ethnic backgrounds, but right now people of color are much more likely to be vitamin D deficient than people of European descent. So by not

trumpeting from the rooftops that vitamin D can save your lives, you are unquestionably disproportionately causing people of color to die of this horrible disease. I realize there are other things that could be done.

Mr. Speaker, I will repeat here: insufficient vitamin D levels, 25.6 mortality rate compared to 2.3 percent with adequate levels. People with vitamin D deficiency are 14 times more likely to have a severe or critical case of COVID.

Why does the average person not know this?

I tell them when I run into them, but I can't talk to everybody. It would be nice if the public health establishment would talk a little bit more about that.

One other thing, by the way, I was hoping on COVID he would do, the protocol of a lot of hospitals is to determine the drugs they prescribe by what is recommended out of the big agencies in the government. And there are a lot of very intelligent people who feel that we would have saved a lot of people if we could have used off-label drugs rather than the $3,000-a-day remdesivir. In other words, they felt there were better drugs that would probably cost one-hundredth of the amount of the drug that was being pushed out of CDC. It would be nice in America, the land of the free, if we would allow doctors in hospitals to use these other drugs. I think, again, Mr. Speaker, you would have significant savings compared to where we stand right now.

These are some of topics that I think were not addressed and should have been addressed and would save lives if appropriately addressed in the State of the Union.

We will mention one more because we have a little bit of time here. President Biden, to his credit, pointed out that a lot of people are dying from illegal drugs. He didn't exactly have any concrete proposals as to what to do. When I got this job 7 years ago, 47,000 Americans were dying every year from illegal drug overdoses. Fifty-seven thousand people died in 12 years in the Vietnam war. And they made a big deal about that when I was a child. Now you have 47,000 in 1 year, Mr. Speaker, when I got elected.

Do you know what it is now, Mr. Speaker?

One hundred thousand. It is as if we are having two Vietnam wars every year, and the politicians hardly talk about it.

Now, I think one of the reasons President Biden wouldn't come up with anything concrete is that almost all the fentanyl--a drug which he wouldn't even mention by name which is responsible for most of these deaths--almost all of the fentanyl is coming across the southern border, and, of course, our President doesn't like to talk about the southern border because we have a largely open southern border in which 90 to 100,000 people every month are coming across.

It also may mean a little bit more of an aggressive law enforcement going after the people who sell the fentanyl. But, of course, we can't say we should have more aggressive law enforcement, and we can't say that more drug dealers should wind up in prison because then we would have more in prison.

So rather than doing these things, why don't we just let 100,000 people a year die?

Some people can say drug possession and sale of drugs is a victimless crime. I say if you think about the parents or the spouses or the children or the siblings of the 100,000 people who die, I don't know how we cannot do more to address this problem.

I would hope that next year in the State of the Union speech President Biden does a little more to address the 100,000 people who are dying of drug overdoses and does a little more to address the perhaps hundreds of thousands of people whose lives could be saved if we freed up doctors to prescribe whatever drugs they wanted to and if we would have pushed a little bit more vitamin D.

I think we would have a much more well-informed electorate if the educational system and the journalist establishment did a little more to educate the public about the Holodomor.

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

Madam Speaker, with regard to what is going on in Ukraine, I stand with everybody in saying it is an absolutely horrific

thing. If the United States can keep Ukraine and free Ukraine, that is what we should all be hoping and praying for.

We heard a speech last night, in addition to the very relevant numbers, and in addition to the numbers of people dying in Ukraine and the people being injured, we cannot forget that every month in America another 90,000 people cross our southern border. We cannot forget that every month in America 8,000 more people die of drug overdoses. We cannot forget in America, compared to 3 years ago, we deport, every month, approximately 6,000 less people from this country for committing crimes.

Madam Speaker, I realize a lot is going on around the world and it is easy to forget about it, but America should not allow its politicians to forget about this huge sea of people crossing the border and the huge number of people dying of drug overdoses and the broken hearts of their parents, their siblings, and their children.

Madam Speaker, I would like to comment a little bit on the speech last night and some of the issues that have been ignored and should be addressed and some of the issues that were given such short shrift it was almost comical.

The first issue I would like to address is inflation. Next time I should get my own billboard here. But if you look at M2, which is one measure of the monetary supply, in the 1970s--and I am old enough to remember the 1970s when inflation was really a horrible thing and something that we were never supposed to repeat--M2 was going up at a rate of about 7 percent year over year. We now are up about 37 percent year over year.

I mean, if you look at a graph, it is shocking the degree to which the Federal Reserve is just flooding money into our system. Of course, a major reason why they have had to do this is wildly excessive spending, because if you have excessive spending and foreign governments do not want to buy your debt, and who would want to buy your debt, you wind up with no alternative but to degrade the value of the dollar.

I thought it was particularly amazing that the President said or told businesses that you have to ``lower your costs,'' meaning that we shouldn't reduce wages, which is fine, but like it is an easy thing to lower your costs. I wonder, has President Biden ever actually talked to the businesses who are raising their prices?

The first thing I hear about is the metals, the aluminum, the different kinds of steel that are up 300, 400, 500 percent. When the market, the cost of these things go up to that degree, and you are a businessman, what in the world are you supposed to do?

The cost of transportation is going up, and the amount we pay truckers, which is a tremendously good occupation, has gone up. Sometimes you can't even get trucks. And what has President Biden done? He imposes a vaccine mandate on truckers, which further reduces the supply of an occupation that is already in demand, thereby guaranteeing the cost is going to continue to go up even more.

I strongly encourage President Biden to have some of his staff run around Washington, D.C., or maybe run around and talk to some of the factory owners in this country and ask them or advise them what they are supposed to do to ``lower their costs.'' Most of them, because we have a shortage of people working, are already probably exceeding last year's output in product. Despite the fact that they are doing that, and so, therefore, they are getting more per hour worked, but they can't find any new ways to reduce costs.

But, again, I hope President Biden sends some of his cabinet members around the country and either advises them on how it is going to be easy to lower your costs or hears from them how impossible it is for them to lower their costs.

By the way, every single manufacturer I have talked to in the last 2 months--and I bet I have talked to 15, 20--every one of them thinks inflation is going to get worse. When I talk to farmers who use a variety of fertilizers, whatever, that goes into their product, they see the costs going through the roof. And every single farmer I talk to thinks inflation is going to get worse.

So I strongly encourage the Biden administration to have some people get out there among the hoi polloi and find out what is really going on with regard to inflation.

Next, President Biden talked about the police. And maybe President Biden doesn't realize what the problem he and his allies have created by going after the police. In Milwaukee, the city just to the south of my district, there was a dramatic increase to an all-time record high number of murders in 2020, something that you never thought you would see again, and it was exceeded again in 2021.

Why is that happening? It is because President Biden and his allies have adopted an antipolice rhetoric, in particular implying an amount of racism out there, and they are pushing a bill that has already been through this House, a bill that will make it much easier to hire a policeman.

Now, if a policeman wants to do his job, sometimes they have to arrest people, sometimes they have to wrestle with people. If you can wind up being sued, you are much less likely to want to do that. And when you have police that are less engaged, particularly in our busiest cities, what are you going to get? More crime. We cannot say we are serious about the spiraling number of people who are being shot to death or stabbed to death in this country until we allow the police to be police again. We have got to stop that police hatred that goes on.

And I don't care whether we eventually send a few hundred million dollars around the country to hire more police or whatever President Biden has up his sleeve, what we have got to do is we have got to build respect for police again so that they are free to maintain the safety in this country.

The third thing I will look at that I thought, again, was misleading to the public, concerns election laws. Many States, including Wisconsin, have a photo ID law. President Biden and his acolytes imply that a photo ID law is motivated by racism. Again, this is unnecessarily divisive.

One of the reasons why I feel that Joe Biden is the most divisive President in my lifetime, I have praised him for his speech last night in which he didn't call this country racist after using the racial word or white supremacy so much in his inaugural speech; nevertheless, it is a little bit ridiculous when in order to have fair elections some of us want to have photo ID and then people stand around when photo ID is needed for things that probably have a much more dramatic impact on the average person's life, but it doesn't bother them.

We had a requirement here in town that you present proof of vaccine with which you had to produce a photo ID, if you wanted to go to a restaurant in this town. I would say it is a fairly significant thing. Did anybody say that the District of Columbia was being racist because they required a photo ID if I want to eat at a restaurant?

They want to look at my ID before I get in an airplane. If I had to fly somewhere to get some surgery, if I had to fly somewhere to see an ailing relative, that could be a real life-changing experience. Does anybody say, oh, it is racist to require a photo ID if I got on an airplane? We just put up with this routinely.

Nevertheless, President Biden fans the flames of division by claiming that those of us who want to make sure that we have fair elections are motivated by racism when photo IDs are needed so commonly.

The next thing I want to point out that I think he gave short shrift to with an insultingly small amount of time was the huge number of people who are dying of drug overdoses in this country.

I got this job only 7 years ago. At the time, 47,000 people a year died of drug overdoses. By comparison, in 12 years during the Vietnam war, 57,000 people died. And every politician was supposed to talk about it. Now we shoot up from 47,000 to 100,000 people, and President Biden can't even bring himself to talk about fentanyl, the drug responsible for most of those deaths.

I don't know why he wouldn't talk about fentanyl. My guess is because overwhelmingly it is coming across the southern border, and he doesn't want to do anything about the southern border. However, I would hope in the future, President Biden would meet with law enforcement around the country, find out what it is like to have to tell the parents or siblings or children of the people who have died that their relative has died. That is a horrible thing.

And I think to gloss over the 100,000 deaths we have every year in this country--twice the number of people who died in the 12 years in Vietnam--was I thought very callous. But, again, I would encourage President Biden to ask members of his administration to get out and about a little bit, talk to relatives of people who have died of drug overdoses, particularly fentanyl, and maybe it will cause him to devote a little bit more time on that in next year's State of the Union address when he realizes what a horrible situation we have.

There are many other things that I don't think were addressed accurately or in depth during the State of the Union address that should have been.

Mr. Speaker, as we break here for a recess, it is important to remember that COVID is still a very serious threat, and a little under 2,000 people a day are dying of it.

I have been contacted by medical professionals in my district who feel there is too much pressure to use

remdesivir and not enough opportunity to use ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to treat this horrific disease. This is unprecedented that people would step in.

As I understand it, hospitals are billing out over $3,000 a day for remdesivir, but they may be getting under $50 or $60 a day for ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

The combination of doctors being prevented from doing what they want and the fact that some people are making a lot more money on one drug than the other is something the press should be looking into, and it is something I think our Oversight and Reform Committee should be looking into.

I hope if anybody is paying attention, you pick up on this story and see what the real background is. I am not an expert on the topic, but experts on the topic do believe that people are dying unnecessarily.