Balanced-budget amendment will get votes in Congress

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

As a “supercommittee” tries to find $1.5 trillion in new deficit cuts this fall, Republicans will be pressing a far more ambitious goal: passing an amendment to the Constitution to require a balanced federal budget.

The idea is being pushed most forcefully by conservative activists eager to shrink the government and its spending but disappointed with the results they’ve achieved so far in Washington, where Democrats control both the White House and the Senate.

“Spending cuts and caps are steps in the right direction,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. But a balanced-budget amendment is “the only permanent solution to control government spending and end our nation’s spending-driven debt crisis,” Sessions said.

House GOP leaders — short of the two-thirds margin required to pass the amendment — have held off scheduling a vote. But both House and Senate are required to hold votes this fall as one of the conditions of recently enacted legislation to raise the government’s borrowing cap.

It’s a decidedly uphill battle, even though Republicans control the House with larger numbers than they had in 1995, when a balanced-budget amendment sailed through the chamber with 300 votes. It fell just one supporter short of the required two-thirds margin in the Senate.

There appear to be fewer Democratic backers now than there were in 1995, when 72 House Democrats voted for the amendment. For starters, there are far fewer southern white conservative and moderate Democrats in the House than there were back then.

And Republicans have made the task more difficult by pushing a significantly more stringent Tea Party-backed version of the amendment now than they did in 1995. The new version would virtually make it impossible for future Congresses to raise taxes by requiring a two-thirds vote in both House and Senate. It also would force a huge shrinking of government programs by capping spending at 18 percent of the nation’s total economic output each year. This year, government spending is running about 25 percent of the gross domestic product, the widest measure of the U.S. economy.

Democrats won’t back the stricter version. But if House leaders also press a vote on the 1995 version — which permits tax increases by a simple majority vote — they’ll run into opposition from conservative activists such as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who say the old version is a recipe for higher taxes.

“There are lots of reasons not to like the original balanced-budget amendment,” Norquist said, warning that it could lead to tax increases imposed by lawmakers squeamish about cutting spending, or even by federal courts.

Given the enormity of the nation’s fiscal gap, future Congresses facing a balanced-budget mandate would surely consider tax increases as a way to ease cuts to defense, Social Security, Medicare and other domestic programs.

Even Tea Party-driven House Republicans shunned such cuts earlier this year when adopting a nonbinding GOP budget blueprint that forecast deficits in the $400 billion range for most of the decade. Republican decided against offering a balanced budget because it would have forced cuts on current recipients of Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Lawmakers did have an opportunity to vote for balancing the budget in the form of a much stiffer budget plan offered by the conservative Republican Study Committee, which promised a balanced ledger by the end of the decade.

That balanced-budget plan, however, won only 119 votes in the 435-member House in April and a majority of Republicans opposed it. The balanced-budget blueprint relied on massive cuts to domestic programs such as health care and food aid for the poor. It also featured politically implausible proposals such as raising the eligibility age for full Social Security retirement benefits to 70.

In 1995, the failure of the balanced budget amendment to pass the Senate propelled then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., to engineer congressional passage of a seven-year balanced-budget plan. It fell prey to a veto by President Bill Clinton but set the stage for a bipartisan balanced budget two years later.

The so-called supercommittee is required to produce cuts in the range of $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion — too small to satisfy the Tea Party-driven House. So a vote on a balanced- budget amendment is an opportunity to take a tougher stand, even as lawmakers are spared difficult votes on concrete proposals to cut spending further. Should the amendment win two-thirds votes in both the House and Senate, that would negate the requirement for the supercommittee’s deficit cuts or an alternative $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts if the panel fails to find a compromise or its recommendation is rejected by Congress.

The proposed amendment is an opportunity for Democrats to cast a tough-on-spending vote. Sixteen House Democrats have signed on to the version that passed the House in 1995.

It would take 48 Democratic votes to pass either amendment, assuming that all 240 House Republicans vote for it as well.