Good News/Bad News

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I will remove my mask here for the speech since we are all alone.

Today I would like to address the Chamber with regard to something I consider good news, because there is not enough good news that we talk about here. We always talk about the problems. But then I am going to address one potential problem brought to my attention by one of my constituents, and I am going to ask the Committee on Education and Labor to take up that problem.

The first issue in which I received good news is with regard to immigration. Only 15 months ago, about 90,000 people were let in this country, largely because they asked to come here on asylum and, pending an asylum hearing, were let into the country.

Obviously, it would be preferable for our country if every person who was allowed in the country is appropriately vetted and we know will become a productive citizen. When we allow people in the country for other reasons, we get people here who will not necessarily be an asset to America and will ultimately, perhaps, ruin America.

This has been done by three things.

First of all, we have reached an agreement with Mexico, whereby the Mexican Government is holding people who in the past were allowed into the United States and told to show up for a court hearing at some future date, maybe years down the road. Obviously, when you let somebody in the United States and tell them to show up for a court date years down the road, you are not maintaining control of our borders.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Trump administration and the Mexican Government for agreeing to hold a considerable number of people south of the border.

The second thing that was done was President Trump reached agreements with countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to stop the spigot of more people coming into our country even south of Mexico. And, of course, these people came not only from other Central American countries, but South America and Africa as well.

Four times I toured the border, and I found people were coming across not only from Mexico, but from Central America. And, actually, people were coming from Asia and Africa to Brazil, to Central America to work their way north.

So I thank President Trump and I thank the Governments of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador for not allowing people through their country who are clearly planning on coming to the United States other than through the legal mechanisms that we have available.

Finally, President Trump allowed our Border Patrol to turn people around to deal with the COVID epidemic. I know a lot of people wouldn't have liked to do that, but President Trump put the United States first and now allows our Border Patrol to immediately turn people around.

The combination of these three things means we have gone from over 90,000 people a month coming into this country who we really haven't vetted and are now, among people who are touched by the Border Patrol, under 2,000 people a month. As a matter of fact, I am told it is under 1,000 people a month, but that is almost too good to believe.

But that is good news for the American people, particularly when you consider all the people who come here are not appropriately vetted, wind up becoming a public charge perhaps, wind up involved in drug dealing perhaps. So that is your first good news of the night for America.

The second good news: I know when President Trump ran for this office, he talked about reducing the number of troops abroad and keeping them out of harm's way.

However, this week, showing up on a subcommittee of Government Oversight and Reform, to my surprise--again, these are statistics I almost can't believe, they are so good--in the last 7 months since a preliminary agreement was reached between the Taliban and the Afghan Government and the United States, there have been no military-connected casualties in Afghanistan. We have gone 7 months without a combat casualty of our troops in Afghanistan despite the fact that we have 8,000 or 9,000 troops there.

If you would have told me that was possible 4 or 5 months ago, I wouldn't have believed it. No military casualties during a 7-month period.

I was not aware of it until this week, and I, therefore, assume the vast number of Americans were not aware of it, but we should all be grateful that we have now gone 7 months in a row without a military casualty in Afghanistan.

The third thing I would like to address tonight is dealing with possible medical advancements that can help us deal with the COVID pandemic.

I sometimes feel, as I address the COVID pandemic, that our government agencies are focused solely on a vaccine and are not thinking outside the box.

Today I talked to a couple of researchers from Israel who continue to be optimistic on using fenofibrate, which is a drug which has traditionally been used to fight cholesterol.

Well, they don't like to be nailed down because nobody knows how many lives would be saved if we gave people, in the beginning stages of the pandemic, fenofibrate. It is possible that we could reduce the number of fatalities by 30 or 40 percent.

Again, fenofibrate is an easily available, in generic form, drug used to treat cholesterol. There are, right now, over time, better drugs. It is not as used as it once was. But, nevertheless, their preliminary studies are very positive.

I wish our own CDC or NIH would get on the ball and help these researchers a little bit, because they feel they can have a definitive answer by winter. They feel that 3 months from now, we may have something that will be a cure for something like 30 to 40 percent-- maybe 20 percent, maybe 30 percent--of the people who have this virus who now die.

Can you imagine if we could reduce the number of fatalities by 30 percent by a simple expedient, not of developing an expensive vaccine, but if we could save all these lives with an easily available generic drug used for cholesterol today?

Mr. Speaker, I again ask CDC and NIH to think outside the box and help these researchers and find out if their preliminary work is accurate, and then we can save so many lives even if a vaccine is not developed.

So there is the good news, kind of good news and bad news in that one. The good news is we are on the cusp of a cure; the bad news is we have got to get the American bureaucracy to think outside the box.

The final thing I am going to address is some unfortunate news.

The prior speaker talked about people being treated differently, depending on who they are.

It was brought to my attention 2 weeks ago of something I normally run on, or I ran on originally, by a woman who had two children who went to college.

She and her husband were hardworking, middle-class Americans. And like most hardworking, middle-class Americans, when their children went to college, they had to take out loans and both of their children had loans in the $30,000 to $50,000 category.

Because she did a good job of raising her children, they were hardworking, and working their way to paying off those loans, which is a good thing.

But she has talked to other people and she found out other people, who perhaps weren't married, weren't working as hard, that their children received grants from the government.

So in other words, if you get married and work hard, we treat your children different than people who don't get married. And, of course, there are wonderful parents in all sorts of families.

But just particularly, after we just got done with a speech pointing out that we should treat everybody the same, I would like to ask the Committee on Education and Labor to hold a hearing and find out if it is really true.

Are we penalizing children of married couples because of their parents' marital status? Are they stuck repaying $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of student loans just because their parents are married, and they wouldn't have had to take them out if their parents hadn't been married?

So I am going to ask my good friend, the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, to look into this.

Recently, it has been in the paper that there are some powerful groups at work in the United States who are opposed to the nuclear family. So whether this is something that happened by accident, or whether it happened intentionally because of longstanding groups that are opposed to the old-fashioned, nuclear family, I would like to know.

And I think, given all of the hearings we have had around here on discrimination, it would be great if we could get to the bottom of this and find out whether my constituent is right and her children were both penalized $30,000 to $50,000 each just because their parents were married.

So I ask my good buddy from Virginia to hold that hearing, and I appreciate the time on the floor tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I ask that we adjourn, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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