After speaking about his administration's latest effort to bring student debt relief to Americans, President Joe Biden weighed in on the race to replace Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House – and emphasized the need to lower the temperature in the nation's capital.

"More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington," Biden said Wednesday in an appeal to bipartisanship. "I know we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies. We need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another.  And we can do that."

The Democratic president largely stayed out of the negotiations on the 11th-hour deal that McCarthy put forward over the weekend, which led to his ouster on Tuesday night, but he and his administration had been critical of the now-former speaker walking away from a deal they negotiated earlier this year on spending cuts in exchange for raising the country's debt limit. 

Biden kicked off Wednesday's student loan relief event with brief remarks explaining what comes next in the race to be the next House speaker while warning that lawmakers have a busy agenda ahead of them – including another agreement to fund the government beyond mid-November and providing more aid for Ukraine.

"The House will now reorganize and select a new Speaker," Biden said. "I know it’s going to take some time. But I remind everyone: We have a lot of work to do, and the American people expect us to get it done."

The president emphasized that the agreement reached over the weekend "funds for government only another 40 days," adding: "We cannot and should not again be faced with an 11th-hour decision of brinksmanship that threatens to shut down the government. "

"We know what we have to do," Biden continued. "We have to get it done in a timely fashion."

And, he said, it has to get done in a bipartisan fashion.

"I join with Minority Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries, D-N.Y., in saying to our Republican colleagues: We remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion," the president said of his fellow Democrats. "We’re prepared to do it as well for the good of the American people."

Biden hailed this year's two bipartisan agreements – on government funding and the debt limit – and while he lamented that "we should never have been" so close to a shutdown or default, respectively, "in the first place," he said he was "grateful that leaders on both sides came together, including former Speaker McCarthy, to do the right thing."

When asked why Biden hasn't spoken to the California Republican in recent weeks, the president said they "had two agreements we shook hands on" and "assumed [McCarthy] was working with ... I knew he was working with the Democrats in the House and Senate."

"It wasn't for me to do anything," Biden said. "If he wanted to talk to me, I was available. I'm available to whomever wants to talk to me. But the idea that I was going to somehow convince McCarthy to change his view was not reasonable."

At a briefing on Wednesday after Biden's speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the White House sees "the election of the speaker as an internal matter of the House of Representatives," but emphasized that Biden "hopes that the House will quickly elect a speaker, because the urgent challenges facing our nation will not wait."

Jean-Pierre would not address specific candidates for the role or Biden's specific relationships with any members of Congress.

On the subject of Ukraine, Biden said that he will announce "very shortly" what he called "a major speech" on aid for the country.

Responding to a question from a reporter, Biden said the disarray on Capitol Hill "does" worry him, but he knows that "there are a majority of members of the House and Senate in both parties who have said that they support funding Ukraine."

"I'm going to be announcing very shortly a major speech I'm going to make on this issue and why it's critically important for the United States and our allies that we keep our commitment," he added.

"I'm going to make the argument that it's overwhelmingly in the interest of the United States of America that Ukraine succeed," Biden said. "It's overwhelmingly in our interest – I've spent two-and-a-half years putting together coalitions that no one thought could be put together.  And they've strengthened us across the board, not just as it relates to Ukraine, whether it's Japan and South Korea or whether it's what's happening in Europe itself.

"So I think that it's clear to the vast majority of the foreign policy community on both left and right that this has been a valuable exercise for the United States of America to increase the support we have around the world," Biden continued, noting that he spoke with several allied nations recently about continued aid to Ukraine.

"We had a long conversation and [I] made the case that I knew that the majority of the American people still supported Ukraine, and the majority of the members of the Congress – both Democrat and Republican – support it," he added. So I don't think we should let the gamesmanship get in the way of blocking it."

He also expressed concern about the rest of his policy provisions, both foreign and domestic, amid the disarray in the lower chamber of Congress.

"The dysfunction always concerns me," Biden said. "The programs that we have argued over, we passed bipartisanly ... I'm not concerned that they're going to all of a sudden come in and try to undo them."

"There is a half a dozen or more extreme MAGA Republicans who would like to eliminate despite everything I've done," he continued. "But I don't think that's going to get there."

When asked about his advice to the next speaker, Biden laughed and replied: "That’s above my pay grade."