Joseph Biden, Jr.
Former U.S. Senator from Delaware, 1973-2009 (Democrat)

Birthday:

Nov 20, 1942

On the Floor

Watch Senate proceeding 11-16-06 4:28:36 to 4:33:20 at MetaVid. More Videos | Congressional Record

Congressional Service

Below are the past and present terms in the Senate, House, and White House held by Joseph Biden:

When	Role	Representing
1973-2009	U.S. Senator	Delaware	(Most Recent Term Began in 2009) (was preceeded by James Boggs)

Sponsorship Analysis

Biden is a rank-and-file Democrat according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship.

These labels come from the Political Spectrum statistical analysis that we have carried out. The statistical analysis puts members of Congress on a scale based on patterns of bill sponsorship, and is blind to party affiliation and the content of bills. From there, we have somewhat arbitrarily divided the Members of Congress into far-left/right, rank-and-file, and moderate (i.e. centrist). For each party, the most extreme 23% of Members of Congress are labeled far-left or -right. The most centrist 30% (i.e. those closest to the other party) are labeled moderate. The remaining 47% are labeled as rank-and-file.

Biden is a leader according to our statistical analysis of bills in this legislative session. Other Members of Congress tend to cosponsor Biden’s bills. For more, see congressional statistics.

To compute the leader-follower score for Biden, we make a table that lists all other Members of Congress. Each row has the number bills sponsored by Biden and cosponsored by the other Member of Congress divided by the number of bills sponsored by the other Member of Congress and cosponsored by Biden.

This is a measure of who is following who. The higher the number, the more times others are cosponsoring Biden's bills without Biden returning the favor. We then take the mean of (the logorithms of) these ratios. Thanks to Joe Barillari for the idea.

Voting Record

Joseph Biden missed 490 (7%) of 6730 votes between Jan 25, 1989. and Jan 15, 2009. The graph to the left shows the number of missed votes over time. Click for a larger chart and a list of recent votes.

Money & Influence

The top campaign contribution to Biden in 2007-2008 was $195,050 from employees of Simmons Cooper LLC. Joseph Biden’s net worth was between $-320,983 and $215,997 in 2007, according to Biden’s mandated financial disclosure statements. For more information, see the Center for Responsive Politics’ page for Biden.

Bill Sponsorship & Cosponsorship

Joseph Biden has sponsored 219 bills between Jan 14, 1991. and Oct 1, 2008 of which 149 haven't made it out of committee and 17 were successfully enacted. Biden has co-sponsored 908 bills during the same time period. (The count of enacted bills considers only bills actually sponsored by Biden and companion bills identified by CRS that were themselves enacted, but not if they were incorporated into other bills, as that information is not readily available.)

Search Sponsored/Cosponsored Legislation

Photo from the Congressional Pictorial Directory.