"The worst sin of all is the abuse of power,” Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday. | Getty Biden: Hill Democrats must stop 'abuse of power'

Vice President Joe Biden issued an existential call to get more Democrats in Congress on Wednesday evening, telling roughly 120 members and many donors that “the country needs you as much now as it has since ... maybe

... since I held public office.”

“The worst sin of all is the abuse of power,” Biden said, repeating a point he makes often and turning it over to the Democrats in Congress to fight any abuses of power to come.


Speaking at a closed fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, Biden, according to a person in the room, pledged to stay involved — “I’m leaving, but I’m not going to be quiet,” he told them and warned the party against running away from its core values.

The question, Biden said, is figuring out how to break through in a way that he acknowledged Hillary Clinton never managed to in going up against Donald Trump.

“It’s time to talk about it ... lay it out ... everything that we are for,” Biden said.

Think of the issues that will be in front of Congress in the years ahead that Democrats weren’t able to break through on during the campaign, Biden told the members, and that’s the challenge.

He said the news of this week so far, with House Republicans voting to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, , only to retreat from doing so after public outcry, should have Democrats both on their guard and inspired.

“Exhibit 1: trying to get rid of the OCE,” Biden said. “They went ahead and moved and I was like, ‘Oh my god.’”

On Obamacare, he warned Republicans are going to “inherit the wind,” needing to now come up with real answers for all the people who have pre-existing conditions, all the children who’ll have to come off their parents’ insurance and all the people whose private insurance costs won’t go down.

There is “enormous challenge and enormous opportunity ahead, as long as we don’t forget who we are,” he said.

Part of that must be Democrats’ changing how they talk about the issues, Biden said, urging them to “start communicating in plain, spoken communications to the regular people. We are never going to give up on the poor or disadvantaged, or give up on our progressive values. But people are scared.”

But another part of that, he insisted, was proudly standing up for the record of the Obama administration and what it did working with the Democrats on the Hill over the past eight years.

“We cannot let Republicans have collective amnesia about that progress,” Biden said.

Post-Jan. 20, Biden will be spending part of his time in Washington, though he’ll also have affiliations at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware as he continues work on his cancer “moonshot” research coordination and other issues.

And, he said, politics is going to be a big part of what’s ahead.

“I'll be here to do anything I can to help from the sidelines,” Biden said.

He closed by joking that President Barack Obama asked him recently what he’d be doing in January, February and March.

His answer: “I'm doing 17 fundraisers for Democrats!”

The vice president's office did not return a request for comment.

