A graduate of Harvard Law School, Baker also served as a judge advocate general in the Kentucky Air National Guard for 20 years.
Baker supported Nunn's efforts to raise the state sales tax to benefit education, the first of several education-related causes he would champion.
He narrowly lost a bid to return to his old Senate seat in 1984, but unseated the incumbent in 1989, spending the interim serving on the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education.
[5] He earned a scholarship to attend Harvard College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a friend and classmate of future Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
[10] In 1974, Baker was the lone vote against a Senate resolution honoring Martin Luther King Jr., explaining that he thought the Civil Rights Movement had pushed for too much too soon.
[4] He was also the lone Republican to vote against a bill allowing public schools to post copies of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms; Baker explained that he thought the law was unconstitutional.
[10] On June 15, 1981, Baker resigned his seat in the state senate to accept President Ronald Reagan's appointment as assistant general counsel for International Affairs in the Department of Defense.
[17] Baker countered that Travis had been a "reflexive 'no' vote" in the Senate and that his support of proposals with little change of succeeding, such as a right-to-work law and shoring up the state workers' compensation system by moving Kentucky coal miners to the federal black lung disability system amounted to ideological grandstanding.
[24] Baker countered that Freas has also put several of his family members on the city's payroll, pleaded guilty to drunk driving in January 1986, and filed for bankruptcy in April 1987 following the failure of his restaurant business.
[25] Following the 1989 legislative session, Baker's was one of three names recommended to President George H. W. Bush by Senator Wendell H. Ford as potential replacements for Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Pierce Lively, who assumed senior status.
[26] After the Kentucky Supreme Court declared Kentucky's entire public education system unconstitutional due to inequalities in funding for local districts, Senate President John "Eck" Rose appointed Baker as the only Republican legislator on the committee charged with creating a system that would meet the court's definition of constitutionality.
[28] In 1990, Baker reversed an earlier position, joining Gerald Neal, the only African-American member of the Senate, in advocating for a bill to make Martin Luther King, Jr. Day a state holiday.
"[29] A Lexington Herald-Leader columnist wrote of Baker's speech, in which he recounted that his family had owned slaves until his great-grandfather freed them in the 1820s, that it "set such a high moral tone for the Senate that no one else spoke – and no one voted against the King holiday.
[4] In 1995, at the request of the United States Information Agency, he advised the parliaments of Tomsk and Nizhny Novgorod on writing constitutions.
[2] Later that year, he received the William H. Natcher Award for Outstanding Public Service from the Barren River Area Development District.
[30] On April 8, 1996, Democratic Governor Paul E. Patton announced his appointment of Baker to the Kentucky Supreme Court, replacing Justice Charles H. Reynolds, who died in January.
[31] Baker resigned his seat in the Senate on April 15, the final day of the legislative session, and was sworn in as a justice an hour later.
[32] Four men, including Baker, announced their candidacy for the November special election to fill the remainder of Reynolds' term.
[39] The appointment was not confirmed by the Kentucky General Assembly, however, which cited a statute requiring the Council's makeup of Democrats and Republicans to reflect the parties' proportion of voter registrations.
[35] Because of these issues, Baker resigned from the Council on February 26, 2008, saying "I hope it doesn't conclude my public service, but it severs all connection to state government at the present.