meets with Birch Bayh and
Marvella Bayh in 1962 in 1967 in 1978
Drafter of constitutional amendments As a freshman senator, Bayh was assigned to the
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary and the
United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. While his service on the Public Works Committee allowed him to assist
Hoosiers with various problems, Bayh's work on the subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee had the most lasting effect.
Presidential disability and succession After President
Dwight D. Eisenhower's health issues in the 1950s, Congress began studying the Constitution's dangerously weak and vague provisions for presidential disability and vice presidential succession. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought a new urgency to the matter. Bayh introduced an amendment on December 12, 1963, which was studied and then re-introduced and passed in 1965 with
Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. most notably in the 1973 vice presidential and 1974 presidential succession of Gerald Ford.
Lowering the voting age to 18 As a state legislator in the 1950s, Bayh unsuccessfully worked to lower the voting age in Indiana. He continued his effort in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he also met opposition. In 1970, a new provision was added to the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, lowering the voting age to 18 in all federal, state, and local elections. Then with the 1971
Oregon v. Mitchell decision, the Supreme Court ruled that state and local elections did not have to abide by the lowered voting age, though there would have to be dual elections in the 47 states where the lower federal voting age was not valid. Faced with another constitutional crisis, Bayh's subcommittee quickly began hearings on an amendment to lower the voting age to 18. What became the
Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed through Congress within weeks of the Supreme Court's decision, and was ratified by the states within months. Thrown to the front of the plane, Kennedy could not move from his waist down and could not reply to Bayh's calling, "Is there anybody alive up there? Is anybody alive?" Bayh smelled gas and thought the plane might catch fire and explode, so he went back into the fuselage to check for survivors. At this point, Kennedy called out, "I'm alive, Birch!" and Bayh pulled Kennedy out of the plane to safety. Bayh went back again to check on Moss and Zimny, but they were unresponsive. Bayh and his wife then walked to the road to call for help. In 1980, Bayh endorsed President
Jimmy Carter for reelection, a decision that rankled the staff of Ted Kennedy, who was challenging Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy's campaign adviser
Bob Shrum called Bayh "a son of a bitch" in front of Kennedy, but as Shrum wrote in his memoir, "Kennedy was disappointed in Bayh, but he didn't want to hear anyone bitching about him. Bayh, he said, had a pass, and always would".
Women's rights Equal Rights Amendment The
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), to establish equal rights for men and women under the
Constitution of the United States, was first introduced in 1923 and then in every subsequent Congress for the next fifty years, with little to no success. In 1970, Bayh witnessed one of these efforts to pass the ERA languish and fail due to poor-wording and "
Wrecking amendment" conservative amendments. After the House approved its version under the leadership of
Martha Griffiths of Michigan, the Senate easily passed Bayh's ERA in March 1972, sending it to the states for ratification. The amendment had seven years to win approval in thirty-eight states. Thirty states ratified the ERA within the first two years, and another four joined in 1974 and 1975. Bayh's home state of Indiana was the final state to ratify the ERA in January 1977, but by then, three states had rescinded their ratification, and three more would do so by the end of 1979. but the Equal Rights Amendment ultimately failed.
"The Father of Title IX" Bayh was influential in the addition of
Title IX to the Higher Education Act, and its chief Senate sponsor. In his remarks on the Senate floor, Bayh said, "We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to
postgraduate education because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a 'man's place' on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the 'weaker sex' and it is time to change our operating assumptions". "While the impact of this amendment would be far-reaching", Bayh concluded, "it is not a panacea. It is, however, an important first step in the effort to provide for the women of America something that is rightfully theirs — an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work". Title IX became law on June 23, 1972, and is best known for expanding opportunities for female athletes. Bayh has since been called "the father of Title IX".
Haynsworth and Carswell nominations During the
91st United States Congress, Bayh successfully led the Senate opposition to two of President
Richard Nixon's nominees to the
Supreme Court of the United States. In August 1969, Nixon nominated
Clement Haynsworth, a federal judge of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, to a vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the resignation of
Abe Fortas on May 14, 1969. Labor and civil rights leaders, concerned with Haynsworth's conservative record on workers' and civil rights, soon discovered that Haynsworth had recently ruled in a favor of a company in which he owned stock, and after questioning him on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bayh felt Haynsworth did not recognize his own conflict of interest. of the nomination, and The
New York Times reported how he "worked with his staff into the night to complete a "bill of particulars" of alleged financial conflicts by Judge Haynsworth", ultimately uncovering several additional instances where Haynsworth had conflicts and misled in his Senate Judiciary testimony. Thus, in November 1969, Bayh and 54 other senators rejected the nomination. On January 19, 1970, Nixon nominated
G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, whom the Senate had confirmed to the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit exactly seven months earlier. Carswell's judicial record was even more conservative then Haynsworth's and generally acknowledged to be mediocre, but after the earlier defeat of the latter's nomination, most doubted there would be another major battle. Then a group of
Yale Law School students visited Bayh in Washington and asked how they could help. Bayh suggested that they research every case that Carswell had decided in his judicial career. With their research in hand, "Bayh led the opposition interrogation of Carswell in the two weeks of committee hearings",
United Press International reported. The Senate rejected Carswell's nomination by a vote of 51 to 45. Nixon publicly criticized Bayh and Senate opponents for overstepping their proper constitutional role, to which Bayh replied in a Senate floor speech by quoting from
Article Two of the United States Constitution and calling the President "wrong as a matter of constitutional law, wrong as a matter of history and wrong as a matter of public policy".
Harry Blackmun was ultimately nominated and confirmed to fill the vacancy. Bayh later supported and voted to confirm Nixon's nomination of
Lewis F. Powell Jr., whom he knew well from work on the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
Electoral College reform The proposed Constitutional change with which Bayh was most closely associated in his final years in the Senate was his attempt to eliminate the
United States Electoral College (the method of electing the
President of the United States) and replace it with a popular vote in the 1960s and 1970s. Bayh was convinced the Electoral College needed to be abolished after holding initial hearings on reform. He realized that the system couldn't be fixed, as it was so out of date: a president elected today needs only 23% of the popular vote, if they receive the votes in the right places. One of Bayh's proposals passed the House easily but was
filibustered in the Senate. In 1977 he introduced reform legislation into the Senate, but it never achieved the required two-thirds vote in either chamber of the
United States Congress contained in
Article Five of the United States Constitution. The coalition is a group of states that agrees to vote with the national popular vote once the coalition's member states' electoral votes are a majority. Bayh wrote a foreword to the book
Every Vote Equal by
John Koza, a co-founder of National Popular Vote.
Prison reform for juvenile offenders As chairman of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Bayh was the author, sponsor and chief architect of the
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, overhauling the youth prison system, including the requirement that juvenile offenders be separated from adults. After chairing 1971 hearings on brutality and corruption in the youth prison system, Bayh introduced legislation in February 1972, which was signed into law in 1974. Besides the deinstitutionalization of noncriminal offenders, it also created the
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the Department of Justice, to ensure ongoing protections. The landmark legislation was reauthorized in 2002. During the October 3, 1977, signing ceremony for H. R. 6111, an extension of the
Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, President
Jimmy Carter noted his discontent with Bayh not being in attendance as he had "been very instrumental in the passage of this act".
1976 presidential campaign Bayh intended to run for the
1972 Democratic nomination for president, but his wife was diagnosed with
cancer and he put his plans on hold. Before her death in 1979, Marvella Bayh became a leading anti-cancer activist. On October 21, 1975, Bayh announced his candidacy for the
1976 Democratic nomination in a tour of his native state. "People are looking to someone who can talk to them in terms they can understand", he said while struggling with
laryngitis that day. With a liberal record and farm boy demeanor, Bayh's candidacy was premised on his 'electability.' His campaign literature was headlined, "Yes He Can". In December 1975, Bayh came within a tenth of a percentage point from receiving the endorsement of the influential New Democratic Coalition, a liberal organization based in New York that helped
George McGovern win the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. On the eve of the January 19, 1976,
Iowa caucuses, Bayh and former Georgia Gov.
Jimmy Carter were considered the leading candidates. Bayh ultimately finished a distant third behind Uncommitted delegates and Carter, seemingly hindered by his support for women's rights. "Bayh has become the focal point of the [abortion] issue", said the executive director of the
National Right to Life Committee, since Bayh opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortion before his subcommittee. Liberal support did not coalesce and Bayh finished third in the
New Hampshire primary and then seventh in the Massachusetts primary. Bayh suspended his campaign on March 4, 1976, after 136 days as a formal candidate. At his final press conference, he said, "I'm not prepared to crawl under a rock and say the future of Birch Bayh is over".
Bayh–Dole Act In early 1978, the question of who owns government-funded research and who could therefore profit from it became personal for Bayh, as Marvella's cancer returned and the Bayhs learned that a technology that could predict a patient's reaction to
chemotherapy was held up by restrictions on patent rights for federally sponsored research discoveries. This was part of a larger problem of stifling promising inventions, with 22 funding agencies disposing of patent rights in 22 different ways at the time. which allows United States universities, small businesses, and non-profit organizations to retain
intellectual property rights of inventions developed from
federal government-funded research. It was signed into law by President Carter on December 12, 1980. In 2002,
The Economist magazine said, "Possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century was the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980". A 2015 study determined that from 1996 to 2013, patent licensing made possible by Bayh–Dole increased gross industry output by approximately $1 trillion, supporting 3.8 million jobs in the United States.
Senate reelection campaigns Bayh ran for
reelection to the U.S. Senate three times. In the 1968 general election, Bayh defeated challenger
William D. Ruckelshaus with 51.7% of the vote against a strong Republican tide, becoming only the fourth Indiana Democrat to be popularly elected to a second term in the Senate. In 1974, Bayh narrowly defeated Indianapolis Mayor
Richard Lugar, garnering only 50.7 percent of the vote in what was otherwise a disastrous year for Republicans. Two years later, Lugar won Indiana's other Senate seat by ousting Democratic incumbent
Vance Hartke. In 1980, Bayh faced
Indiana's 4th congressional district member and future Vice President of the United States
Dan Quayle. Bayh engaged the challenger in seven debates, and was defeated for reelection in Republican landslide year as part of
Reagan's coattails, with 46.2% of the vote to Quayle's 53.8%. == Post-Senate career ==