Biography

Birch Evans Bayh Jr. (January 22, 1928 – March 14, 2019) was an American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a member of United States Senate from 1963 to 1981. He was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the Twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the first person since James Madison and only non–Founding Father to have authored more than one constitutional amendment. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the United States Electoral College.