President Biden on Wednesday praised his party’s legislative success in the first two years of his administration and urged House Democrats to spend the next two years making sure voters know about it, too.

As a keynote speaker at the opening day of the House Democrats’ annual theme conference in Baltimore, the president ticked off a list of accomplishments in the first half of his term: approval of the US bailout, Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure law, Chips and Science Act, a narrow gun law and marriage equality.

In addition, he pointed to an unemployment rate of 3.4%, 12 million new jobs, seven months of declining inflation, a significant drop in gasoline prices from the peak of the pandemic, and an economy that has grown steadily.

“People, you all know how much we’ve done, but much of the country still doesn’t know,” Biden said. “That’s why the big task ahead is to implement the laws we’ve passed so that people start to see it in their lives, all the benefits that are there because you produced it for them. You stepped up and made it happen .”

Biden stressed that there is more to do, including passing police reforms, immigration reforms, voting rights legislation, codifying a woman’s right to choose an abortion, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and rewriting the tax law, anything improbable. go anywhere in the new era of divided government with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats running the Senate.

“Look, I know as well as you do that the MAGA Republicans won’t get in on most of these things, but that leaves a lot of Republicans left,” Biden said.

House Republicans are instead focusing on their own legislative priorities, using their new committee chairs to launch investigations into the administration.

One issue that House Republicans ultimately need to work with Democrats on is raising the debt limit to prevent the US from defaulting. Biden, who met McCarthy at the White House this year to discuss the debt limit, has challenged Republicans to show him exactly where they want to make cuts to reduce the deficit.

Biden, who will release his annual budget proposal next week, said the deficit will be reduced by $2 trillion over the next decade.

He criticized Republicans for playing politics with the country’s credit, especially after they voted three times during the Trump administration to raise the debt limit without demanding cuts.

“We’re not going to sit here and lecture ourselves about fiscal responsibility by those people. Nearly 25% of the total national debt, which took over 200 years to build up to nearly 25%, was added in four years by my predecessor,” said Biden. said. “They certainly don’t act like the party that cares about fiscal responsibility.”

McCarthy has said he won’t raise taxes to reduce the deficit, and House Republicans have promised that cuts to Medicare and Social Security are also off the table.

“At the State of the Union, I was happy to see so many Republicans stand up when I asked them to join us in rejecting Social Security cuts,” Biden said. “I’ve been to a lot of State of the Unions and never seen one like this. But they all got up. The interesting thing is they won’t be able to forget it’s all on camera.”