On March 3rd, 1965, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments began hearings on proposals to modify the Warren Court’s “one-person, one-vote” cases. Four days later, Bloody Sunday occurred in Selma, Alabama.
The hearings resumed on March 9th. It was business as usual. There was no mention of those terrible events. On March 15th, President Johnson gave his famous “We Shall Overcome” speech to a Joint Session of Congress.
By the time the hearings wrapped up in May, there were many references to Black voting. Witnesses like Robert K. Kennedy asked what modifying the Court’s cases would mean for the proposed Voting Rights Act. Others said that the bill (then under discussion) should be given breathing space to become law and be implemented before any constitutional amendment was considered?
The events in Selma basically killed this Article V proposal in Congress. You can see this play out in real time as a natural experiment.