A New Research Project

Senator Birch Bayh's papers are held by Indiana University. Senator Bayh was the longtime chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments (from the early 1960s until the late 1970s). That committee gave us the 25th and 26th Amendments along with the ERA. I'm planning to do a deep dive into the Subcommittee's materials to see if there might be a compelling story to tell. One thing that I see already is that the Subcommittee served as something of a real-time critique of the Warren and Burger Courts. In other words, conservatives would introduce constitutional amendments to overrule decisions that they did not like. Maybe there is more.