Would Amend Constitution : Big Deficits Stir Interest in Balanced Budget Plan

For a decade now, the proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution and require a balanced federal budget has enjoyed enough popular and political appeal to hoist it almost--but never quite--to the top of the national agenda.

Now, once again, while the best minds argue about whether it is a simple or merely simple-minded solution to runaway deficits, the tripwires are set across the political landscape that could send this would-be 27th Amendment to the Constitution exploding into a full-blown national debate.

Perhaps, even, it could move an uncertain nation toward its first national constitutional convention since the original one in 1787.

In Michigan, the state Legislature reconvenes next month and supporters of the balanced budget amendment have pinned their hopes on winning approval of a resolution calling for such an amendment. If successful, the amendment would be only one state short of the 34 required to force Congress into action.

Meanwhile, with its recent budget struggles under attack as inadequate and the annual federal deficit again climbing toward $1,000 per capita, Congress also reconvenes next month with Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) promising a strong push for a balanced budget amendment. President Reagan is cheering him on.

It is a story told in dramatic ironies and with unsettling warnings.

Why, for instance, has the President, as one of the original and foremost advocates of a balanced budget amendment, never submitted a balanced budget but instead presided over record deficits and the accumulation of $1 trillion or so of national debt?

And what does one make of the cry of alarm from James Dale Davidson, founder of the National Taxpayers Union, that today’s high school graduate will have to pay $10,000 in additional taxes over the next 50 years just to cover the interest on the 1985 deficit, not counting the principal or debt for other years?

The responses, to a large extent, are a matter of one’s point of view. Reagan has not submitted a balanced budget, it is said, because Congress would not pass one--so pick your villain. And, yes, most agree the deficit is bad and bodes darkly for the future.

But disagreement is sharp over whether it has been big enough for long enough to justify tinkering with the basic document of nationhood. There is also broad disagreement over whether the amendment would really do what its drafters intended.

Nor is there one single amendment; proponents--and state legislatures down through the years--have advocated different versions of such a constitutional proposal--which further muddies not only the substantive debate but the political and legal situations as well.

Momentum Increasing

But one thing seems sure: momentum for an amendment has increased as the deficit has come to relentlessly dominate the government.

“In my more cynical moments, I think that the deficit is President of the United States,” Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) ruminated in a speech in Minneapolis.

“It, more than Ronald Reagan, has and will produce a revolution in the shape of the federal government. . . . And it is not just the programs we are cutting. The deficit has also kept us from doing anything new for a whole decade.”

What drives the taxpayer union’s Davidson to push for a constitutional amendment is his view that Reagan and Congress will do little more than talk about curbing the national debt. To Davidson, the federal government perceives the deficit “the way a hillbilly looks at a hole in the roof. When the sun is shining, he asks, ‘Why bother fixing it?’ And when the hailstorm comes, he says, ‘It’s too dangerous to go out there.’ ”

Curbing Growth of Taxes

The constitutional amendment pushed by Davidson, Dole, Reagan and conservatives across the land would not just call for a balanced budget but also would permanently limit the growth in annual tax revenues to no more than “the rate of increase in national income,” which is a statistic the government calculates every year to measure the annual total earnings of the nation.

By pegging total federal revenue to that measure, amendment advocates hope to prevent inflation from pushing taxpayers into higher tax brackets and thus silently raising government revenues. Only a specific vote of Congress for a tax increase could change that.

What this would mean, proponents say, is that federal government’s share of the national economic output would remain steady.

A second version of a balanced budget amendment is pending in Congress, calling for receipts and outlays to be balanced but without any restriction on taxes.

Missouri Vote Recalled

The political situation is this: No state has voted for a balanced budget amendment backed by the threat of a constitutional convention since Missouri did in 1983, according to the taxpayers’ union.

Michigan came close earlier this year, when the state Senate passed such a resolution. But the effort fizzled in the state House on a vote of 51 in favor and 55 against, and a two-thirds margin was required. The state House did pass a measure urging Congress to act on its own, but without language that would trigger a convention if Congress balks, it is considered another toothless exhortation.

Michigan House Republican leader Michael Busch said it would be “rather difficult” to secure the votes needed to secure passage this fall. “The zeal has died down,” Busch said.

But Dole, for one, has not given up. He announced that he will make a second trip to Michigan this fall to lobby for the amendment. And with the White House and some congressional Democrats agreeing that the 1986 deficit is climbing back toward $200 billion despite a difficult seven-month effort to trim spending, supporters hope to cultivate new interest in the campaign.

Possible Action in Ohio

The National Taxpayers Union said it had no other targets for 1985, except an extremely remote possibility of action in Ohio. As for California, GOP efforts on behalf of a balanced budget amendment have been shelved for the remainder of the year.

Meanwhile in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, the Judiciary Committee has approved two versions of the amendment, one calling for tax limits and the other not.

Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), president of CLUBB, or Congressional Leaders United for a Balanced Budget, said in a recent interview that he expects one “or perhaps both” of the amendments to pass the Senate this fall. But even in Wilson’s optimistic assessment, the Democratic-dominated House is a long-shot unless Michigan should suddenly join the ranks of the pro-amendment states.

If that happens, Congress is certain to snap to attention.

‘We’d Scratch Our Heads’

“We’d have to take another look at things, that’s for sure,” conceded Rep. Don Edwards of San Jose, a leading Democratic opponent of the balanced budget amendment. “We’d scratch our heads and if it appeared that an amendment would be written, we’d rather write it than have a convention.”

Edwards is chairman of the House subcommittee that would be charged with the chore of designing and scheduling a constitutional convention if 34 states vote for one. It is a murky, mysterious area of the Constitution, unused in the 198-year history of the document, and thus generates as much or more controversy than the amendment it would be convened to draft.

Who would serve at such a convention? Could the convention not only take on the balanced budget amendment but also rewrite the Bill of Rights? How about new amendments on abortion, ownership of guns and prayer in schools?

All are questions about which the Washington information mill has generated 10 years’ worth of books, monographs, speeches and opinions without reaching a consensus. The only thing certain is that whatever constitutional revision emerged from such a convention would require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

In an interview, Edwards indicated that supporters of a balanced budget amendment would not automatically win a convention or even congressional action on an amendment even if Michigan and one other state join the call.

Stale Resolutions

“There might well be questions of the validity of some of the resolutions,” he explained. “Some of these are quite stale, and we’re going to have to look at them quite carefully.”

Other Democrats have raised questions about the different wording of different state resolutions. Do they really all mean the same thing?

Supporters of the amendment have additional difficulties in contending with rear-guard attempts to rescind previous state actions calling for a balanced budget amendment. So far, moves to reverse earlier votes have failed in Florida and Maryland.

But some congressmen like Edwards, backed up by officials in Michigan and in other states, argue that the tide may be turning at the state level. In the late 1970s, it seemed an easy vote for a local legislator--calling on Congress to put the federal budget in order. Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. of California, a liberal Democrat, even joined the campaign for the amendment. These days, however, states have watched, often painfully and at their own expense, as federal spending reductions cut into local programs from highways to hot lunches.

“There is a concern that if you do pass a balanced budget amendment the onus for raising new revenue or making up for lost revenue will fall on the states,” said Paul Conn, aide to Speaker Gary Owen of the Michigan House.

Powerful Emotions

But then again, the $200-billion federal deficit evokes powerful, basic political emotions and fears. And who can argue convincingly that the government has met the challenge?

“We need an institutional restraint in the Constitution to help us keep the public interest ahead of special interest pressures,” Dole said in a prepared statement of his views. “ . . . The balanced budget amendment would limit our options in a way that is good for us and good for the country.”

Beyond the basic good-vs.-bad argument over the amendment is the question of whether it would accomplish what its backers intend or would it have substantial and unexpected consequences?

In the extreme, one line of reasoning goes, a government desperate to balance its budget may do such things as saddle the medical industry with the responsibility of providing health care to the poor--a move that would reduce the federal budget but surely not the costs to society.

Judge’s Warning

“There is a tendency to think that constitutional rules execute themselves and that they accomplish precisely what was intended. But that is not by any means always the case,” warned Judge Robert H. Bork of the U.S. Court of Appeals, a conservative frequently mentioned as a contender to be Reagan’s next appointee to the Supreme Court.

Before becoming a judge, Bork openly opposed the balanced budget amendment. Now his comments are somewhat more judicious, but still to the point.

“If the very generally worded First Amendment has on balance produced good social policy, as I think it clearly has, that may be because the subjects of speech and press are ones that judges understand fairly well. They are also subjects that lend themselves to relatively simple rules,” he wrote in an 1983 essay published by the American Enterprise Institute.

“It may be doubted that an equally generally worded economic amendment would produce policy as beneficial.”

To that, supporters of the amendment say, with typical brevity, the risk is worth taking because the risk of doing nothing is greater. “People understand we’re overgrazing,” Davidson said.