Editing Birch Bayh (section)

=== 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 [[Hoosier]] with various problems, Bayh's work on the subcommittees of the Judiciary Committee had the most lasting effect.<ref name="Cruikshank" />

Bayh was serving on the [[United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution]] in August 1963 when its chairman, [[Estes Kefauver]], died of a heart attack. Judiciary Committee Chairman [[James Eastland]] planned to terminate the subcommittee to save money, but Bayh offered to serve as chairman and pay for its staff out of his Senate office budget. Thus, Bayh assumed the Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee chairmanship less than a year into his first term.<ref name="Cruikshank" /> As chairman, Bayh was the principal architect of two constitutional amendments.<ref name=":0">{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/obituaries/birch-bayh-dead.html |title=Birch Bayh, 91, Dies; Senator Drove Title IX and 2 Amendments |last=Clymer |first=Adam |date=March 14, 2019 |newspaper=The New York Times|access-date=March 16, 2019 |issn=0362-4331}}</ref>

==== 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.<ref name="Cruikshank" /> The resulting [[Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution]], ratified in 1967, created a process for a [[peaceful transition of power]] in the case of death, disability, or resignation of the President, and a method of selecting a vice president when a vacancy occurs in that office.<ref name="Goodheart" /> It has since been invoked six times,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxv|title=The 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution|website=National Constitution Center|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190314223236/https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxv|archive-date=March 14, 2019|access-date=March 17, 2019}}</ref> most notably in the 1973 vice presidential and 1974 presidential succession of Gerald Ford.<ref name=":0" />

In 1968, Bayh wrote ''One Heartbeat Away'', a book about the passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. In the foreword, Lyndon Johnson describes the accomplishment as, "He initiated and brought to fruition the first major alteration of Presidential and Vice-Presidential succession procedures since the ratification of the Constitution". The book's preface is by former President Eisenhower, who wrote about the sixteen times there had been a vacancy in the office of Vice President and the measures taken to authorize Vice President Richard Nixon to act in his stead during the illnesses he experienced as president.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Blaemire|first=Robert|title=Birch Bayh: Making a Difference|publisher=Indiana University Press|year=2019|isbn=978-0-253-03917-0|location=Herman B Wells Library, 1320 East 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405|pages=77}}</ref>

==== Lowering the voting age to 18 ====
[[File:Senator Birch Bayh addresses a group of students.jpg|thumb|Bayh speaking on a college campus, ca. 1970s.]]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.<ref name="Cruikshank" /> 
As such, Senator Bayh is the only person since the Founding Fathers to have drafted more than one amendment to the United States Constitution.<ref name="Goodheart" />