The final presidential election debate will take place Thursday evening at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. This will be the last opportunity for President Donald Trump to face former Vice President Joe Biden in person on his record.
Trump has criticized Biden’s political career, saying he “has done more in 47 months as president than Joe Biden in 47 years.” Biden entered the Senate in 1973 and his supporters have touted a number of accomplishments since then.
Ahead of the final debate, here are some of Biden’s major accomplishments during his time in public life as a senator and vice president under former President Barack Obama.
Negotiations as vice-president
Biden played a key role in negotiations with Republicans on Capitol Hill following his election as vice president in 2008.
He helped the Obama administration pass several key pieces of legislation, including the Tax Relief Act of 2010, the Budget Control Act of 2011, which dealt with a debt ceiling crisis, and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. The 2012 law solved the problem. called “fiscal cliff”.
Obamacare and the “Cancer Moonshot”
Biden previously highlighted his role in passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. This was Obama’s flagship healthcare law, which was passed in 2010 with limited bipartisan support, and Biden’s personal role appears to have been to rally his own party.
He subsequently participated in the launch of a “Cancer Moonshot” initiative in 2016 aimed at improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease. the Lancet Oncology, a medical journal specializing in cancer, gave Biden unprecedented approval on Oct. 1, 2020 for his commitment to healthcare and cancer research.
Career in the Senate
Biden sponsored one of the first Senate climate change bills in 1986 and proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2007.
In 2008, he successfully passed the PROTECT Our Children Act, which aimed to combat online child exploitation.
Biden has played a role in foreign policy, serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee three times. He spoke passionately about the need to impose sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa in 1986 and advocated for intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as the country descended into civil war. and ethnic cleansing.
He also pushed the former Eastern Bloc countries to join NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union, which many of them did.
The law on violence against women
Biden co-sponsored the original Violence Against Women Act in 1994 with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Biden was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The law was passed with bipartisan support in both houses of Congress and after its passage, intimate partner violence against women fell 53% through 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The 1994 Crime Bill
This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of Biden’s career. The Democrat championed the 1994 Crime Bill, which he broadly drafted and saw by the Senate, as a reduction in violent crime. Critics on the right and left see it as one of its greatest weaknesses.
In particular, the bill is accused of leading to mass incarceration, or at the very least of exacerbating the trend towards mass incarceration, and of disproportionately affecting African Americans. Biden said some aspects of the bill were wrong.
Senate Judiciary Committee
As a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Biden urged then-President Ronald Reagan to remove Jeff Sessions as a candidate for Alabama Federal District Court amid allegations that Sessions had made race-insensitive comments to staff while serving as a US lawyer in Mobile, Alabama. The sessions were not confirmed but became a US Senator and Attorney General under Trump.
Biden became chairman of the Judicial Committee in 1987 and served until 1995. He was instrumental in preventing Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork from being confirmed. Opposition to Bork centered on his views on court rulings on civil rights and abortion. Some conservative critics accuse Biden of being unfair to Bork and the term “borking,” meaning sabotaging a person appointed by justice, has entered the political lexicon.
During his tenure as president, Biden oversaw the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He said he regretted handling the hearings with Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment.
He also presided over the confirmation hearings of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993. She was only the second woman to sit on the tribunal.
ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP / Getty Images
