Twilight Zone

Balanced-budget politics

Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the minority leader, for weeks had been criticizing the proposed constitutional amendment that would require a balanced federal budget. Republican Senator John Tower of Texas told colleagues he would try to pressure his state legislators back home into not ratifying it. "Ninetynine percent of us have doubts," said Minnesota Republican Senator David Durenberger. "I don't know if it will work."

But when the Senate last week cast a suspenseful roll-call vote on the amendment, Byrd, Tower and Durenberger all voted for it. They were far from alone in saying aye to a measure they privately opposed. "If we were voting in a dark room," declared Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine, one of only seven Republicans to go against the measure, "it might get six votes." But in the spotlight last week the amendment got 69, two more than the required two-thirds majority. Twenty-two of the Senate's 46 Democrats joined 47 Republicans, cheered on by the White House, to fashion the win.

In a sense, the Senate voted to put off until tomorrow what Congress and the White House cannot bring themselves to do today: balancing the budget. Byrd, for instance, who faces a difficult re-election in November, waited until he saw that his own vote would not be decisive before he took the politically expedient course of adding his approval. Such election-year maneuverings helped provide a victory for President Reagan, who had championed the amendment despite his own inability to propose anything remotely resembling a balanced budget.

The President nonetheless praised Congress for resisting "specialinterest pressure for still more red-ink spending." Republican Cohen saw the matter differently. He compared the conservatives who had supported the amendment, only days after voting for new spending projects in their home states, to St. Augustine, who had prayed, "Dear Lord, give me chastity--but not just yet."

The favorable Senate vote had been forged mainly by Utah's conservative Republican Orrin Hatch, Majority Leader Howard Baker and South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond. But an unexpected last-minute hitch developed when Colorado Republican William Armstrong proposed a requirement that the legal ceiling on the national debt could be lifted only by a three-fifths majority in each chamber of Congress. The requirement was tacked on to the amendment, thanks to the mischievous support of many Democrats. They viewed the Armstrong addition as yet another clearly frivolous requirement that should not be embedded in the Constitution. But they found it useful as a way of rendering the whole amendment less politically attractive and more intellectually absurd. An angry and worried Hatch agreed, warning, "Conservatives who have fought for the balanced-budget amendment for 25 years may have now done themselves in."

That prognosis might yet prove true in the House, where the Democratic leadership is trying to keep it bottled up in the Judiciary Committee. A petition to send the proposal to the House floor has been stalled at 184 signatures, 34 short of the required 218. But if Senate passage of the amendment does pressure the House to produce something, the lower chamber is unlikely to include the debt-ceiling provision, might exempt Social Security funding from any budget-balancing requirement and might stitch in a new loophole or two to make the amendment effectively powerless.

Whatever finally emerges from a House-Senate conference to resolve differences would still have to be ratified by 38 state legislatures. That route should take at least four years. Perhaps much longer: experts predict that the first victim of a forced balanced budget in a recession would probably be federal aid to the states. As one of the Senators who cast a cynical vote for the amendment told a colleague last week, "Thank God, my state legislature will never ratify this thing."

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