Birch Bayh Quotes
I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.
Congressman Pepper passed away in 1989.
At the time less than 10% of the Southern Blacks were allowed to vote. The result was that Southern segregationists were elected to Congress even in a state like Mississippi which had a majority Black population, The Southern segregationist bloc was large enough that with a few very conservative Republicans, they formed a coalition could block any civil rights legislation including voting rights reform,
The voting age was reduced from 21 to 18, when 18 year olds were being drafted for military service and some were being killed or wounded. Many argued that a person who was old enough to die for America was old enough to vote in America. 18-21 year olds however have not voted in the same proportions as older citizens. The guilt emenated from the fact that 18 year olds could at that time be drafted to fight in America’s wars and perhaps die, but they could not vote.
Birch Evans Bayh Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as U.S. Senator from Indiana 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 Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, 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 only non–Founding Father to have authored two constitutional amendments. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the Electoral College.
