Balanced Budget Amendment Rejected

The Republican-controlled Senate, reversing its previous stand and handing the Reagan Administration a stinging setback, Tuesday rejected by a single vote a proposed constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget.

Leading supporters said that the cliff-hanging vote probably killed the amendment’s chances, at least until after this year’s congressional elections change the Senate’s membership. “This was a very, very crucial vote,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary constitutional subcommittee. “Frankly, we should have won it.”

Wilson Backs Bid

The vote was 66 in favor and 34 opposed, but that was one short of the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment. California Republican Pete Wilson supported the amendment and Democrat Alan Cranston opposed it.

An earlier version of the amendment had been approved by the Senate on a 69-31 vote in 1982 but died in the overwhelmingly Democratic House.

Four senators who had voted for the amendment in 1982 switched sides, and two who had opposed the amendment the first time supported it this time. Switches in Senate seats since 1982 resulted in a loss of one more vote for the amendment--the crucial vote, as it turned out.

Both opponents and supporters said that a key factor in the amendment’s loss of support was the recently enacted Gramm-Rudman law, which will force automatic spending cuts if Congress cannot produce budgets that steadily hack the deficit down to zero by fiscal 1991. For next year, for example, Gramm-Rudman requires that the deficit, now running at more than $180 billion, be sliced to $144 billion.

“We’re wasting precious time playing Trivial Constitutional Pursuit” when Congress should be focusing on the deadlines for compliance with Gramm-Rudman, said Cranston, the Democratic whip.

‘Vote for Future’

The proposed constitutional amendment had been rewritten to take effect after 1991 and keep the budget in balance after the Gramm-Rudman law had, in theory, achieved that goal. “This really is a vote for the future of America,” Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) argued. “We’re really looking ahead to the future of our children, our grandchildren.”

But other senators said that Gramm-Rudman could prove that Congress can bring the deficit under control without taking the drastic step of amending the Constitution.

“Gramm-Rudman did have an impact, and I think it had a proper impact,” Sen. Daniel J. Evans (R-Wash.) said. “With Gramm-Rudman, we have a chance to try (to balance the budget) statutorily.”

Some supporters of the amendment criticized Reagan’s lobbying for it as half-hearted. “I didn’t see a whole lot of effort on the President’s part,” Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) complained.

But Hatch insisted that Reagan had shown as much vigor as he had in 1982 and was “on the phone many days this week. . . . He really worked hard.”

After the Senate acted, the White House issued a statement saying that the President was “disappointed” but that the closeness of the vote “merely spurs us to come back and try again.”

Lewis K. Uhler, president of the National Tax Limitation Committee, an organization backing the amendment, predicted that the narrow defeat would increase pressure for the alternative method of amending the Constitution: a constitutional convention.

Sweeping Changes Feared

Civil libertarians fear that such a convention, unprecedented in the nation’s history, would open the entire document to sweeping changes, including such possible amendments as one forbidding abortion.

Although 32 states, only two short of the required number, have called for a constitutional convention, the drive has stalled in recent years. Convention backers have lost in the 15 efforts they have made to add additional states since 1983, when Missouri became the 32nd to call for a convention.