The number of sponsors indicated that voting rights legislation was likely to pass on the floor, if an acceptable bill could be reported from the committee. Minutes after the bill was introduced, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT), and…

Broad, bipartisan support for voting rights was signaled by the 66 Senators who were eager to sign as sponsors of an administration-backed bill that had been quietly negotiated with Senate leaders. When introduced on March 18, 1965, 46 Democrats and…

On February 1, 1965, President Johnson announced the launching of a “nationwide job development program.” The following day, Senator Joseph S. Clark (D-PA) introduced S. 974 that provided for an expanded federal jobs training program to address an…

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s health problems and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination heightened support for a constitutional amendment to address the exercise of presidential power in the event of presidential disability and to provide a…

On January 7, 1965, Senator Edmund S. Muskie (D-ME), chair of the Special Air and Water Pollution Subcommittee of the Senate Public Works Committee, introduced S. 306 with 20 cosponsors. The bill was based on findings of a 1964 report of Muskie’s…

On January 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to eliminate the nation’s forty-year-old national origins quota system as the basis for immigration and pass an immigration law “based on the work a man can do and not where he was…

This "Comparison of the Administrative Procedure Act as Proposed to be Amended by S. 1336 with the Existing Law" was compiled by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. It offers a side-by-side…

Despite direct work between Bayh and Celler and drafts of language by legal experts, it took the mediation of Lewis Powell of the American Bar Association with Celler to arrive at the final formulation of S. J. Res. 1 on June 10. On June 30, 1965,…

Realizing that senators could be predicted to see that as a violation of their tradition of unlimited debate, Bayh requested a conference committee and on April 28 the House insisted on its amendments and agreed to a conference. On May 10, the…

On February 22 S. J. Res. 1 was delivered to the House, where it went to the House Judiciary Committee, which had only concluded its hearings on the companion bill, H. R. Res. 1, the week before. On April 13 S. J. Res. 1 was debated in the House and…