Effort for Federal Balanced Budget Hits Snag in State

The Democrat-dominated Senate Rules Committee dealt a major setback Wednesday to a drive aimed at making California the last state needed to call a constitutional convention for a federal balanced-budget initiative.

Supporters of the proposal said the Michigan Legislature is expected to soon become the 33rd state to petition Congress for a constitutional convention on the issue and California would be in line to become the 34th and final state.

It takes 34, or two-thirds, of the states to demand such a convention, whose work must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states to become part of the U.S. Constitution.

Proposals for a federal balanced-budget amendment have kicked around the California Legislature for years, carried both by Democrats and Republicans. None has survived action in both houses.

Skeptics See Problems

Most of the states endorsing the proposal for such an amendment did so during the late 1970s. As the last few got aboard, some skeptics--mostly liberals--questioned whether such a convention would limited itself to the fiscal issue or whether it would also consider such things as rewriting the Bill of Rights.

“California’s action is not a philosophical thing,” observed Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles). “This is the real thing as to whether the Constitution of the United States is going to be subjected to radical change . . . or (the writing) of a new Constitution altogether.”

Sen. Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland) noted that highly respected legal scholars and historians are divided on whether a constitutional convention can be restricted. He proposed that these experts be called as witnesses before the state Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on the balanced-budget measure.

But Republican Sens. John Doolittle of Citrus Heights and William A. Craven of Oceanside said the issue of a balanced budget is so important that it should not be diverted to the Judiciary Committee, where they expressed fear that it would likely die.

They proposed as an alternative that the Senate be convened in a “committee of the whole,” a rarely used process in which the entire 40-member Senate would hear witnesses, debate the measure and vote on it. This would bypass the normal committee hearing process.

The procedure is used occasionally in the Assembly on highly controversial issues but rarely, if ever, in the Senate. “It does become a circus,” Sen. Henry J. Mello (D-Watsonville).

On Losing Side

Doolittle and Craven were on the losing side of a 2-3 vote to create a “committee of the whole” to consider the measure. The Democrats then prevailed in a 3-2 vote to send the proposal to the Judiciary Committee, which is controlled 6 to 3 by Democrats.

Author of the measure, Sen. Edward R. Royce (R-Anaheim), deplored the action as an “attempt to prevent the full (Senate) from hearing, deliberating and voting on the measure.” He said that sending the measure to the Judiciary Committee “significantly reduced” its chances for passage.

The proposal sprang from a ruling by the California Supreme Court last August that removed from the general election ballot an initiative directing the Legislature to ask Congress to call a constitutional convention on the balanced-budget proposal. Under the ballot proposal, lawmakers’ salaries would have been withheld if they had failed to act.

The court ruled that only the Legislature has the power to petition Congress for a constitutional convention and that such a convention cannot be called for by a ballot initiative.