President Joe Biden should remember he was elected to 'stop the crazy' of Donald Trump rather than 'transform America' through his progressive agenda, Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney suggested on Sunday.
The moderate GOP legislator told NBC's Meet The Press there is 'no question that the nation is severely divided' and Biden's had a 'bad' first year in office.
'President Biden said he was going to try to unite the country,' Romney said, adding that 'his comments in Georgia did not suggest he's trying to pull us back together again.'
He was referencing a fiery speech Biden delivered in Georgia last Tuesday while pushing for Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation -- an effort that stalled that same week after the president failed to get moderates Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin on board to change Senate rules that would allow the bill to pass without Republican support.
Biden said Tuesday there was 'no option' but to abolish the filibuster in order for Democrats to pass the reforms with a simple Senate majority. He also compared opponents of his voting rights legislation to racist historical figures like George Wallace and Jefferson Davis.
Democrats are still teeing up a vote on election reform this week.
During his NBC appearance Romney publicly advised Biden to remember how much of his 2020 support came from people who simply wanted Trump out of office.
Romney urged Biden to 'reset' because 'things are not going well' in the country, citing soaring inflation and foreign policy crises in Afghanistan and Russia
'He's got to recognize that when he was elected, people were not looking for him to transform America. They were looking to get back to normal, to stop the crazy,' Romney said.
'It seems like we're continuing to see the kinds of policy and promotions that are not accepted by the American people.'
And it's not just on the voting rights front, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate said, before listing off the Biden administration's first-year policy crises.
'He's had a bad year,' Romney said. 'I mean, people are 7 percent poorer now because of Biden inflation. Gasoline prices are, what, 50 percent higher than they were when he took office.'
'The border is a mess. COVID was resurgent, but he didn't have in place the tests people needed to keep themselves safe. And then, of course, there was the disaster in Afghanistan. Russia's now threatening Ukraine.
'Things are not going well, and the president needs to stop and reset and say what is it he's trying to accomplish.'
He added: 'And if it's to try and transform America, he is not going to unite us.'
Romney said Biden has largely shut Republicans out of the White House's voting rights discussions
He urged the president to remember the large number of Americans who voted him into office to 'stop' Donald Trump
'Bringing us together means finding a way to work on a bipartisan basis. He had one success, the Infrastructure Bill, and that was done by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate working together. Build on that kind of success,' Romney said.
He accused the White House of shutting Republicans out of its voting rights discussions.
'Sadly, this election reform bill that the president has been pushing, I never got a call on that from the White House,' Romney said.
'There was no negotiation bringing Republicans and Democrats together to try and come up with something that would meet bipartisan interest.'
He seemed to leave the door open to a future compromise, saying: 'We can work together on almost every issue where there's common ground.'
But that narrative was disputed by Virginia Democrat Senator Tim Kaine, who appeared on CBS News' Face The Nation on Sunday.
Kaine told host Margaret Brennan he's 'found zero support' among his colleagues across the aisle on voting rights, with the exception of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.
'We can get no co-sponsors despite repeated efforts when we put the bill up on the floor to proceed to it, they vote against even debating the bill, knowing that they could block its passage. They don't even want to talk about it,' Kaine said.
Last week Biden made a rare trip to Capitol Hill to try and persuade Democratic Senators to pass voting rights legislation without GOP support. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had set a goal of passing the bill by Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 17.
But to do that Democrats would've needed to stop a virtually certain Republican filibuster, which if not scrapped altogether would need 60 votes to overcome.
With a razor thin 50-50 split in the Senate, Biden needed every member of his party in Congress' upper chamber to agree to scuttle the filibuster.
Those attempts have earned swift backlash from Republicans, who called out Democrats for flip-flopping on their efforts to preserve the filibuster when they were the minority party in 2017.
Romney said Tuesday immediately after Biden's speech: 'I don't recall a single claim from Democrats that employing the filibuster hundreds of times over the last several years when they were in the minority was in any way racist.'
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell blasted the speech as 'profoundly unpresidential.'
Also on Sunday, their fellow Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana excoriated Biden for spreading 'lies' in his Georgia speech during an interview with CNN's State Of The Union.
'Now if you're trying to call the United States of America to unity, trying to get us to where we will come to common ground, you don't end up spreading things that are untrue, are frankly lies, and that's why people think we need to filibuster, otherwise you're just totally rolled by somebody who's willing to sacrifice truth to pursue their agenda,' Cassidy said.
