Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. (born November 20, 1942) is an American politician serving as the 46th president of the United States. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 47th vice president from 2009 to 2017 under Barack Obama and represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009. Raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and New Castle County, Delaware, Biden studied at the University of Delaware before earning his law degree from Syracuse University in 1968. He was elected to the New Castle County Council in 1970 and became the sixth-youngest senator in American history when he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware in 1972, at age 29. Biden was a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eventually became its chairman. He also chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 to 1995, dealing with drug policy, crime prevention, and civil liberties issues; 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. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. Biden was reelected to the Senate six times, and was the fourth-most senior senator when he resigned to serve as Barack Obama's vice president after they won the 2008 presidential election; Obama and Biden were reelected in 2012. As vice president, Biden oversaw infrastructure spending in 2009 to counteract the Great Recession. His negotiations with congressional Republicans helped pass legislation including the 2010 Tax Relief Act, which resolved a taxation deadlock; the Budget Control Act of 2011, which resolved a debt ceiling crisis; and the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which addressed the impending "fiscal cliff". He also led efforts to pass the United States–Russia New START treaty and helped formulate U.S. policy toward Iraq through the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. In January 2017, Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction, making him the first president to receive it before taking office. On April 25, 2019, Biden announced his candidacy in the 2020 presidential election. He became the presumptive Democratic nominee in April 2020 and reached the delegate threshold needed to secure the nomination in June 2020. Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris defeated incumbent president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the general election. Biden is the oldest elected president, the first from Delaware, and the second Catholic. His early activity as president centered around a series of executive orders as well as proposing, lobbying for, and ultimately signing the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 into law to help speed up the United States' recovery from the economic and health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing recession. In addition to emergency and legislative actions pertaining to the pandemic, Biden's executive orders reversed several Trump administration policies. His reversals included rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change, reaffirming protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, halting construction of the Trump border wall, ending the national emergency at the southern border declared by the Trump administration, ending the Trump travel ban imposed on predominantly Muslim countries, and revoking permits for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.