A member of Senate Republican leadership says he hopes to make President Joe Biden a "one-half-term-president" by ensuring that the GOP wins back control of the House of Representatives and the Senate during the 2022 midterms.
Senate Republican Chair John Barrasso, representing Wyoming, made the comments during an event held by the Ripon Society, a conservative think tank. During the event, Barrasso brought up comments made by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell regarding then-President Barack Obama ahead of the 2010 midterms.
"Mitch McConnell's come under a lot of criticism for saying at one point he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president. I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president," Barrasso said. "And I want to do that by making sure (Democrats) no longer have the House, Senate and White House."
In 2010, McConnell told the National Journal that "the single most important thing" Republicans wanted at the time was to make Obama a "one-term president."
"I don't want the president to fail; I want him to change," McConnell said at the time.
While Obama did win re-election in 2012, Republicans won back the House and the Senate in 2010, scuttling some of Obama's political ambitions for the second half of his first term.
Later on in his remarks, Barrasso — the third-highest ranking Republican senator — said the bigger threat to the Republican cause may be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
"Joe Biden will never veto a bill. He'll go down in history as a president who has never vetoed a bill because he will sign whatever Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi put on his desk. Period," Barrasso said. "He's not going to get anything he doesn't agree to sign, he's just along for the ride right now, and they're running the show, and the party is moving further and further to the left."
Barrasso later posed the upcoming midterms to the conservative crowd as a choice between "growing the government" and "growing the economy."
Barrasso isn't the only current member of Senate party leadership to commit to blocking the Biden agenda.
Earlier this year, NBC News reports that McConnell indicated that he is "100% committed to "stopping" the policy agenda of the Biden administration.
"We're confronted with severe challenges from a new administration and a narrow majority of Democrats in the House and a 50-50 Senate to turn America into a socialist country, and that's 100 percent of my focus," he said.
