Joe Biden Beatrice Gormley (classic children's novels txt) 📖

Souter. Vice President Biden, with his long experience on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was glad to help her get ready for the hearings. Sotomayor sailed through the process and was easily confirmed by the Senate. She was the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

A year later, in May 2010, Obama nominated Elena Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stevens. She, too, was confirmed by the Senate.

Also in May, Joe Biden took a trip that had a bittersweet personal meaning. After giving a commencement speech at Syracuse University, he visited Bellevue Elementary School. There he told the kids about Neilia, “the most beautiful teacher,” and how he used to play basketball with her students on the playground as he waited for her.

Along with the Obama administration’s victories, they suffered some serious defeats. In the congressional elections of November 2010, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives by a landslide. “A shellacking,” President Obama called it. Now the Democrats would have a harder time passing legislation.

Just as Jill had predicted, living in the vice president’s residence in Washington had great advantages. Joe and Jill Biden were delighted to have Hunter and Kathleen and their three children not far away. Hunter had given up his lobbying business, to avoid political embarrassment for his father, and now he had a consulting firm.

Hunter’s youngest daughter, Maisy, and Sasha Obama were in the same class at Sidwell Friends School. The two were best friends. Kathleen Biden and Michelle Obama also became close, and the two women and their girls even took vacations together.

As for Beau, he and Hallie stayed in Wilmington. Having returned from his tour in Iraq with his National Guard unit, Beau was now back to working as attorney general of Delaware. And he seemed perfectly fit and healthy, as he always had been.

So it was a shock to the Biden family when suddenly, one day in 2010, Beau woke up paralyzed on his right side. Joe rushed to the hospital, but by then Beau’s symptoms had just as quickly disappeared. The doctors decided it wasn’t anything serious.

Still, Joe was deeply shaken. And Barack Obama was also worried, because during the previous two years of working together, he and Joe had become friends. When Biden returned to the White House, Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod was startled to see the president running down the hall. Barack was running to greet his friend Joe, to give him a big hug.

In 2012, President Obama and Vice President Biden were up for reelection. Their Republican opponents were Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. That May, Biden made a campaign appearance on Meet the Press. An issue in the news at the time was same-sex marriage, and Obama was still officially against legalizing it.

But Joe Biden, when asked about same-sex marriage by the interviewer, blurted out that he was “absolutely comfortable” with it. Although Biden’s previous position was that marriage could be only between a man and a woman, he now believed that marriage was all about the question, “Who do you love?” He believed that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same civil rights as straight couples.

President Obama had cautiously, privately come around to this position. But the Obama administration (including Biden) had intended to wait until November, after Obama had been reelected, to publicly announce the change. So Obama was taken aback that Biden had jumped the gun on national television. However, the president set the confusion to rest by announcing his new position on ABC’s Good Morning America: “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

And on Tuesday, November 6, President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden were reelected.

“My Beautiful Boy”

Now President Obama and Vice President Biden had another four years to accomplish their goals for the country. But there was a shadow waiting to fall over Joe’s personal life.

In 2012, as Joe won reelection as vice president, Beau Biden easily won reelection as attorney general of Delaware. Joe had great hopes for his older son. He hoped that Beau would follow him into the Senate seat he’d left. And he hoped even more that Beau would run for the presidency one day. Maybe Joe himself could never be president, but he felt sure that Beau could.

Ever since Beau’s paralysis scare in 2010, he’d felt fine. Then, in 2013, he began to have symptoms that did not go away. He had dizzy spells; he had hallucinations. That summer, a brain scan showed a large tumor on the left side of his brain. Surgery to remove most of it revealed that it was an aggressive, malignant brain cancer.

Beau’s cancer was probably incurable. But he believed in the Biden motto, “If you get knocked down, get up.” He was determined to fight his cancer, and he began the attack with radiation and chemotherapy.

“Don’t let anybody tell me what the percentages are,” Beau told his father and brother. “I’m going to beat this.” Throughout his treatment, he continued working as attorney general.

At one point in 2014, Beau was so weakened by his harsh treatment that he thought he might have to resign from his job. Joe worried that Beau and his family would lose their only income, and he and Jill considered taking out a second mortgage on their house. When Barack Obama heard about this, he ordered Joe, “Don’t do that.” Barack had enough money, and he would lend it to Joe if the Biden family needed it.

But Beau rallied, and in November 2014, he announced his plan to run for governor of Delaware in 2016. For Thanksgiving 2014, the whole Biden family gathered as usual on Nantucket Island. This joyful tradition had started in 1975 with just Joe, Jill, Beau, and Hunter.

As the Bidens had celebrated the holiday together year after year, the family had grown to include Ashley, then the boys’ wives, the five grandchildren, and finally Ashley’s husband, Howard Krein. For many years,