Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the United States Electoral College.

[6][7] He led the Senate opposition to the nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, two of Richard Nixon's unsuccessful Supreme Court nominees.

As a student at New Goshen (Fayette Township) High School, young Birch took part in speaking contests, played baseball and basketball, and won the Indiana 4-H Tomato Championship.

[8] From 1946 to 1948, Bayh served as a Military Police Corps with the United States Army in occupied Germany following World War II.

[9] He excelled in sports, competing as a Golden Gloves boxer in college[10] and taking part in two Major League Baseball tryouts.

[11] Bayh graduated from the Purdue University School of Agriculture in 1951, where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega social fraternity and senior class president.

He married Marvella Hern in August 1952, and took courses at Indiana State University in Terre Haute for two years while also running the family farm.

Bayh's disadvantage was dramatized in the opening scene of the 2000 film Thirteen Days, as President John F. Kennedy rattles a newspaper and asks an aide, "You see this goddamn Capehart stuff?"

[8] 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.

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.

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".

Kennedy was seriously injured, fracturing three vertebrae, breaking ribs and puncturing a lung, while Moss and the pilot, Edwin J. Zimny, suffered fatal injuries.

[22][23] In 1970, Bayh witnessed one of these efforts to pass the ERA languish and fail due to poor-wording and "poison pill" conservative amendments.

Bayh based his appeal on extending the rights already guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to a person's gender.

The new version immediately won support from two important Senators who had opposed the earlier bill: Ted Kennedy and Robert P. Griffin, the assistant Republican leader.

[24] 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.

[8] Bayh successfully fought to extend the seven-year ratification period to June 30, 1982,[26] but the Equal Rights Amendment ultimately failed.

"[Bayh] says he will never forget", the Associated Press reported, "how she went on Indiana television, set her Social Security card on fire and argued that women would lose constitutional protections if ERA won".

[8] By October, Bayh was widely recognized as "the leading opponent"[36] 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",[37] ultimately uncovering several additional instances where Haynsworth had conflicts and misled in his Senate Judiciary testimony.

[39] 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.

[40] With their research in hand, "Bayh led the opposition interrogation of Carswell in the two weeks of committee hearings", United Press International reported.

[51] After chairing 1971 hearings on brutality and corruption in the youth prison system,[52] Bayh introduced legislation in February 1972, which was signed into law in 1974.

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.

[8] Bayh invited United States Senate member Bob Dole, a Republican from Kansas, to craft a uniform policy.

[67] 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.

[69] 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.

[79] In 1981, Bayh joined Robert Drinan, Don Edwards, Edith Green, Patsy Mink and Pat Schroeder to file an amicus brief before the Supreme Court in the case of North Haven Board of Education v. Bell.

The brief urged affirmance of the lower court's decision that Title IX proscribes employment discrimination in federally funded education programs.

[citation needed] On August 19, 2004, Bayh filed an amicus brief in another case relating to Title IX, Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education.