Republicans need to take stock of their party after Democrats defied history and held onto the Senate after this week’s midterm elections, according to President Joe Biden.
Biden offered the advice during an impromptu press briefing with reporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia after Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) defeated former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt (R-NV). The president had congratulated Cortez Masto and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) earlier on the telephone.
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“The Republican Party is going to have to make, like other, like our parties in the past have done, it’s going to have to decide who they are,” he said Sunday afternoon local time at the Raffles Hotel Le Royal.
Biden was adamant he was not “surprised” by this week’s voter turnout in Democrats’ favor. With Georgia’s Senate race still to be determined by a run-off, the president contended having 51 seats is “always better” than 50 and admitted he is “looking forward to the next couple years.”
“We’re going to try to get as much done as we can to continue to fulfill the agenda,” he said. “We’re also going to have to be waiting on what happens with this — with the court case on — on student debt, which I’ve — is very important to me.”
Biden has been in Cambodia for two days to meet with South East Asian leaders, in addition to speaking one-on-one with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeo. He is scheduled to travel to Indonesia later Sunday for next week’s Group of 20 summit. There, he is expected to sit down with Chinese President Xi Jinping in-person for the first time of his presidency.
“I know I’m coming in stronger, but I don’t need that,” Biden said. “I know him well. He knows me. There’s no — we have very little misunderstanding. We just got to figure out where the red lines are and what we — what are the most important things to each of us going into the next two years. And his circumstance has changed, to state the obvious, at home.”
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Biden’s Republican comments can be compared with those he made last week during a rare White House press conference in which he signposted his openness to more bipartisan compromise, particularly regarding economic and national security policy. But he also underscored that he would not cooperate on any proposal “that’s going to make inflation worse,” specifically concerning prescription drug prices and tax cuts for “the super wealthy and biggest corporations.”
“This election season, the American people made it clear: They don’t want every day going forward to be a constant political battle,” Biden said in the State Dining Room. “There’s too much that — of that going on. And there’s too much that we have to do.”
