125 Facts About Vice President Joe Biden

Vice President Joe Biden was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and moved with his family to Delaware in 1953 when he was ten years old.

Vice President Joe Biden studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University.

Vice President Joe Biden was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and became the sixth-youngest senator in U S history after he was elected to the United States Senate from Delaware in 1972, at age 29.

Vice President Joe Biden was the chair or ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years.

Vice President Joe Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995; led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act; and oversaw six U S Supreme Court confirmation hearings, including the contentious hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

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Vice President Joe Biden was the fourth-most senior sitting senator when he became Obama's vice president after they won the 2008 presidential election.

Vice President Joe Biden oversaw infrastructure spending in 2009 to counteract the Great Recession.

Vice President Joe Biden proposed the American Jobs Plan, aspects of which were incorporated into the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Vice President Joe Biden proposed the American Families Plan, which was merged with other aspects of the American Jobs Plan into the proposed Build Back Better Act.

Vice President Joe Biden completed the withdrawal of U S troops from Afghanistan, during which the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban seized control.

Vice President Joe Biden responded to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by imposing sanctions on Russia and authorizing foreign aid and weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Vice President Joe Biden's paternal line has been traced to stonemason William Vice President Joe Biden, who was born in 1789 in Westbourne, England, and emigrated to Maryland in the United States by 1820.

At Archmere Academy in Claymont, Vice President Joe Biden played baseball and was a standout halfback and wide receiver on the high school football team.

At the University of Delaware in Newark, Vice President Joe Biden briefly played freshman football and, as an unexceptional student, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965 with a double major in history and political science and a minor in English.

Vice President Joe Biden has a stutter, which has improved since his early twenties.

Vice President Joe Biden says he reduced it by reciting poetry before a mirror, but some observers suggested it affected his performance in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential debates.

In 1968, Vice President Joe Biden earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law, ranked 76th in his class of 85, after failing a course due to an acknowledged "mistake" when he plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote in his first year at law school.

Vice President Joe Biden had not openly supported or opposed the Vietnam War until he ran for Senate and opposed Nixon's conduct of the war.

In 1968, based on a physical examination, he was given a conditional medical deferment; in 2008, a spokesperson for Vice President Joe Biden said his having had "asthma as a teenager" was the reason for the deferment.

In 1968, Vice President Joe Biden clerked at a Wilmington law firm headed by prominent local Republican William Prickett and, he later said, "thought of myself as a Republican".

Vice President Joe Biden disliked incumbent Democratic Delaware governor Charles L Terry's conservative racial politics and supported a more liberal Republican, Russell W Peterson, who defeated Terry in 1968.

In 1969, Vice President Joe Biden practiced law, first as a public defender and then at a firm headed by a locally active Democrat who named him to the Democratic Forum, a group trying to reform and revitalize the state party; Vice President Joe Biden subsequently reregistered as a Democrat.

In 1970, Vice President Joe Biden ran for the 4th district seat on the New Castle County Council on a liberal platform that included support for public housing in the suburbs.

In 1972, Biden defeated Republican incumbent J Caleb Boggs to become the junior U S senator from Delaware.

Vice President Joe Biden was the only Democrat willing to challenge Boggs, and with minimal campaign funds, he was given no chance of winning.

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Vice President Joe Biden received help from the AFL–CIO and Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell.

Vice President Joe Biden's platform focused on the environment, withdrawal from Vietnam, civil rights, mass transit, equitable taxation, health care, and public dissatisfaction with "politics as usual".

Vice President Joe Biden considered resigning to care for them, but Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield persuaded him not to.

Years later, Vice President Joe Biden said he believed the truck driver had been drinking before the crash, but was never charged, and the driver's family said the deaths haunted him until he died in 1999.

Vice President Joe Biden wrote that he "felt God had played a horrible trick" on him, and he had trouble focusing on work.

Vice President Joe Biden met the teacher Jill Tracy Jacobs in 1975 on a blind date.

Beau Vice President Joe Biden became an Army Judge Advocate in Iraq and later Delaware Attorney General before dying of brain cancer in 2015.

Vice President Joe Biden sometimes flew back from overseas to teach the class.

Vice President Joe Biden received considerable attention when he excoriated Secretary of State George Shultz at a Senate hearing for the Reagan administration's support of South Africa despite its continued policy of apartheid.

Vice President Joe Biden became ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1981.

Vice President Joe Biden's supporters praised him for modifying some of the law's worst provisions, and it was his most important legislative accomplishment to that time.

In 1994, Vice President Joe Biden helped pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, known as the Vice President Joe Biden Crime Law, which included a ban on assault weapons, and the Violence Against Women Act, which he has called his most significant legislation.

In 1993, Vice President Joe Biden voted for a provision that deemed homosexuality incompatible with military life, thereby banning gays from serving in the armed forces.

Vice President Joe Biden was junior senator to William Roth, who was first elected in 1970, until Roth was defeated in 2000.

In May 1974, Vice President Joe Biden voted to table a proposal containing anti-busing and anti-desegregation clauses but later voted for a modified version containing a qualification that it was not intended to weaken the judiciary's power to enforce the 5th Amendment and 14th Amendment.

Vice President Joe Biden supported a measure forbidding the use of federal funds for transporting students beyond the school closest to them.

In February 1988, after several episodes of increasingly severe neck pain, Vice President Joe Biden was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for surgery to correct a leaking intracranial berry aneurysm.

Vice President Joe Biden was a longtime member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Vice President Joe Biden chaired it from 1987 to 1995 and was a ranking minority member from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1995 to 1997.

Vice President Joe Biden had known of some of these charges, but initially shared them only with the committee because Hill was then unwilling to testify.

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The committee hearing was reopened and Hill testified, but Vice President Joe Biden did not permit testimony from other witnesses, such as a woman who had made similar charges and experts on harassment, saying he wanted to preserve Thomas's privacy and the hearings' decency.

Liberal legal advocates and women's groups felt strongly that Vice President Joe Biden had mishandled the hearings and not done enough to support Hill.

Vice President Joe Biden later sought out women to serve on the Judiciary Committee and emphasized women's issues in the committee's legislative agenda.

Vice President Joe Biden voted to acquit during the impeachment of President Clinton.

Vice President Joe Biden was a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Vice President Joe Biden became its ranking minority member in 1997 and chaired it from June 2001 to 2003 and 2007 to 2009.

Vice President Joe Biden collaborated effectively with Republicans and sometimes went against elements of his own party.

Vice President Joe Biden became interested in the Yugoslav Wars after hearing about Serbian abuses during the Croatian War of Independence in 1991.

Once the Bosnian War broke out, Vice President Joe Biden was among the first to call for the "lift and strike" policy of lifting the arms embargo, training Bosnian Muslims and supporting them with NATO air strikes, and investigating war crimes.

Vice President Joe Biden has called his role in affecting Balkans policy in the mid-1990s his "proudest moment in public life" related to foreign policy.

Vice President Joe Biden eventually became a critic of the war and viewed his vote and role as a "mistake", but did not push for withdrawal.

Vice President Joe Biden supported the appropriations for the occupation, but argued that the war should be internationalized, that more soldiers were needed, and that the Bush administration should "level with the American people" about its cost and length.

Vice President Joe Biden opposed the troop surge of 2007, saying General David Petraeus was "dead, flat wrong" in believing the surge could work.

Vice President Joe Biden instead advocated dividing Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic states.

Vice President Joe Biden was considered a strong candidate because of his moderate image, his speaking ability, his high profile as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the upcoming Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings, and his appeal to Baby Boomers; he would have been the second-youngest person elected president, after John F Kennedy.

Vice President Joe Biden raised more in the first quarter of 1987 than any other candidate.

Vice President Joe Biden's speech had similar lines about being the first person in his family to attend university.

Vice President Joe Biden responded that politicians often borrow from one another without giving credit, and that one of his rivals for the nomination, Jesse Jackson, had called him to point out that he had used the same material by Humphrey that Vice President Joe Biden had used.

Vice President Joe Biden was required to repeat the course and passed with high marks.

In mid-2007, Vice President Joe Biden stressed his foreign policy expertise compared to Obama's.

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Vice President Joe Biden had difficulty raising funds, struggled to draw people to his rallies, and failed to gain traction against the high-profile candidacies of Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton.

Vice President Joe Biden never rose above single digits in national polls of the Democratic candidates.

Shortly after Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Obama privately told him he was interested in finding an important place for Biden in his administration.

Under instructions from the campaign, Vice President Joe Biden kept his speeches succinct and tried to avoid offhand remarks, such as one he made about Obama's being tested by a foreign power soon after taking office, which had attracted negative attention.

Relations between the two campaigns became strained for a month, until Vice President Joe Biden apologized on a call to Obama and the two built a stronger partnership.

Vice President Joe Biden chaired Obama's transition team and headed an initiative to improve middle-class economic well-being.

Vice President Joe Biden visited Iraq about every two months, becoming the administration's point man in delivering messages to Iraqi leadership about expected progress there.

Vice President Joe Biden oversaw infrastructure spending from the Obama stimulus package intended to help counteract the ongoing recession.

Vice President Joe Biden campaigned heavily for Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, maintaining an attitude of optimism in the face of predictions of large-scale losses for the party.

Vice President Joe Biden led the successful administration effort to gain Senate approval for the New START treaty.

Vice President Joe Biden then took the lead in trying to sell the agreement to a reluctant Democratic caucus in Congress.

Some reports suggest that Biden opposed proceeding with the May 2011 U S mission to kill Osama bin Laden, lest failure adversely affect Obama's reelection prospects.

Vice President Joe Biden took the lead in notifying Congressional leaders of the successful outcome.

In October 2010, Biden said Obama had asked him to remain as his running mate for the 2012 presidential election, but with Obama's popularity on the decline, White House Chief of Staff William M Daley conducted some secret polling and focus group research in late 2011 on the idea of replacing Biden on the ticket with Hillary Clinton.

Vice President Joe Biden made his statement without administration consent, and Obama and his aides were quite irked, since Obama had planned to shift position several months later, in the build-up to the party convention.

Vice President Joe Biden apologized to Obama in private for having spoken out, while Obama acknowledged publicly it had been done from the heart.

Vice President Joe Biden played little part in discussions that led to the October 2013 passage of the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2014, which resolved the federal government shutdown of 2013 and the debt-ceiling crisis of 2013.

In January 2016, Biden affirmed that it was the right decision, but admitted to regretting not running for president "every day".

Vice President Joe Biden continued to lead efforts to find treatments for cancer.

Vice President Joe Biden remained in the public eye, endorsing candidates while continuing to comment on politics, climate change, and the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Vice President Joe Biden continued to speak out in favor of LGBT rights, continuing advocacy on an issue he had become more closely associated with during his vice presidency.

Vice President Joe Biden was accused of withholding $1billion in aid from Ukraine in this effort.

In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian parliament to remove Shokin because the United States, the European Union and other international organizations considered Shokin corrupt and ineffective, and in particular because Shokin was not assertively investigating Burisma.

In March 2019 and April 2019, Vice President Joe Biden was accused by eight women of previous instances of inappropriate physical contact, such as embracing, touching or kissing.

Vice President Joe Biden had previously described himself as a "tactile politician" and admitted this behavior has caused trouble for him.

Vice President Joe Biden won 18 of the next 26 contests, including Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, putting him in the lead overall.

Vice President Joe Biden's transition was delayed by several weeks as the White House ordered federal agencies not to cooperate.

Vice President Joe Biden is the second Catholic president and the first president whose home state is Delaware.

On March 11, the first anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization, Vice President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.

Vice President Joe Biden's decision met with a wide range of reactions, from support and relief to trepidation at the possible collapse of the Afghan government without American support.

In May 2021, during a flareup in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Vice President Joe Biden expressed his support for Israel, saying "my party still supports Israel".

Vice President Joe Biden attended a G7 summit, a NATO summit, and an EU summit, and held one-on-one talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In July 2021, amid a slowing of the COVID-19 vaccination rate in the country and the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, Vice President Joe Biden said that the country has "a pandemic for those who haven't gotten the vaccination" and that it was therefore "gigantically important" for Americans to be vaccinated.

In September 2021, Vice President Joe Biden announced AUKUS, a security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, to ensure "peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific over the long term"; the deal included nuclear-powered submarines built for Australia's use.

Vice President Joe Biden entered office nine months into a recovery from the COVID-19 recession and his first year in office was characterized by robust growth in real GDP, employment, wages and stock market returns, amid significantly elevated inflation.

Vice President Joe Biden faced bipartisan criticism for the manner of the withdrawal, with the evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies described as chaotic and botched.

Vice President Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw, saying that Americans should not be "dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves".

Vice President Joe Biden convened an online Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change to press other countries to strengthen their climate policy.

Vice President Joe Biden pledged to double climate funding to developing countries by 2024.

Vice President Joe Biden began the year by endorsing a change to the Senate filibuster to allow for the passing of the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act, on both of which the Senate had failed to invoke cloture.

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Vice President Joe Biden sought to strengthen ties with Australia and New Zealand in the wake of the deal, as Anthony Albanese succeeded to the premiership of Australia and Jacinda Ardern's government took a firmer line on Chinese influence.

Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin, resulting from continuing negotiations on Biden's initial Build Back Better agenda, which Manchin had blocked the previous year.

Vice President Joe Biden supported the fiscal stimulus in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009; the Obama administration's proposed increase in infrastructure spending; subsidies for mass transit, including Amtrak, bus, and subway; and the reduced military spending in the Obama administration's fiscal year 2014 budget.

Vice President Joe Biden has proposed partially reversing the corporate tax cuts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, saying that doing so would not hurt businesses' ability to hire.

Vice President Joe Biden voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Vice President Joe Biden is a staunch supporter of the Affordable Care Act .

Vice President Joe Biden has promoted a plan to expand and build upon it, paid for by revenue gained from reversing some Trump administration tax cuts.

Vice President Joe Biden opposes drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and supports governmental funding to find new energy sources.

Vice President Joe Biden wants to achieve a carbon-free power sector in the U S by 2035 and stop emissions completely by 2050.

Vice President Joe Biden's program includes reentering the Paris Agreement, nature conservation, and green building.

Vice President Joe Biden has called China the "most serious competitor" that poses challenges to the United States' "prosperity, security, and democratic values".

Vice President Joe Biden has voiced concerns about China's "coercive and unfair" economic practices and human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region to the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

Vice President Joe Biden pledged to sanction and commercially restrict Chinese government officials and entities who carry out repression.

Vice President Joe Biden has said he is against regime change, but for providing non-military support to opposition movements.

Vice President Joe Biden opposed direct U S intervention in Libya, voted against U S participation in the Gulf War, voted in favor of the Iraq War, and supports a two-state solution in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Vice President Joe Biden supports extending the New START arms control treaty with Russia to limit the number of nuclear weapons deployed by both sides.

In 2021, Biden recognized the Armenian genocide, becoming the first U S president to do so.

Vice President Joe Biden was consistently ranked one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, which he attributed to his having been elected young.

Vice President Joe Biden comes from a long line of working people in Scranton—auto salesmen, car dealers, people who know how to make a sale.

In recent years, especially after the 2015 death of his elder son Beau, Vice President Joe Biden has been noted for his empathetic nature and ability to communicate about grief.

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