The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“TOPICS OF INTEREST” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the in the House of Representatives section section on pages H1294-H1296 on March 3.
The Department is one of the oldest in the US, focused primarily on law enforcement and the federal prison system. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, detailed wasteful expenses such as $16 muffins at conferences and board meetings.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Grothman) is recognized for the remainder of the hour as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. GROTHMAN. 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.
{time} 1245
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.
{time} 1300
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.
____________________
