Amendment: Tough Choice for Lawmakers

Until the last minute, Rep. Robin Tallon (D-S.C.) was walking around with two versions of a statement he would read on the House floor during the momentous and often emotional debate over a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget.

One version supported the amendment sponsored by Rep. Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.). The other attacked it.

“Am I seriously undecided? You bet I am,” said Tallon, shaking his head as he sat on a bench outside the House chamber, confiding his doubts to a reporter. He said that he understands the need for a balanced budget, “but I have real problems with this approach. . . . I’m deeply concerned about changing the Constitution of the United States.”

An original co-sponsor of the Stenholm amendment, Rep. Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.), said that it is imperative that the federal budget be balanced, even though he too has “serious reservations” about changing the Constitution.

But entering the chamber before the vote, Mazzoli confided that he had changed his mind and would vote with the Democratic leadership against the amendment. Moments later, however, he emerged from the chamber to tell another reporter that he had changed his mind again and would vote for the amendment. Ultimately he did vote for it.

“I’ve been all over the place. . . . I can’t count how many times I’ve changed my mind in the last couple of days,” Mazzoli admitted. He added that the sources of his indecision were conflicting concerns that a balanced-budget amendment “may work too well or it may not work at all.”

In what several members characterized as the most important and difficult decision of their congressional careers, the controversial amendment ultimately was defeated, falling nine votes short of the two-thirds majority required. But with Democrats deeply divided, the outcome remained in doubt until the last moment. The House voted, 280 to 153, in favor of the measure.

“One member came up to me and said: ‘The undecided die a thousand deaths; the decided, only one. . . .’ Members are really torn,” House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said before the vote.

Republicans charged that the Democratic leadership, which lobbied intensively to defeat the amendment, threatened members that their consciences would not be the only things that suffered if they voted for the amendment.

“Foley made this a very personal fight. He was twisting a lot of arms and there was talk that he went beyond that, linking the vote to people’s future in Congress,” one senior Republican said.

But Foley denied applying that kind of pressure, and several Democrats who had been on the leadership’s undecided list said that it never got that personal. “There was pressure, sure, but nothing like that,” Mazzoli said.

More than emotions, it was a rarely seen level of legislative heroics that branded this as one of the year’s most extraordinary debates. House Majority Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) hobbled in from the hospital bed where he is undergoing treatment for a painful herniated disc to cast his vote against the amendment. Rep. Dick Nichols (R-Kan.) also came rushing back from the hospital bedside of his wife, who is to undergo cancer surgery today, to vote for it.

In the end, several undecided members said that they were swayed by President Bush. “I told the President we both know what needs to be done to balance the budget and asked him what he was going to do about entitlements,” Tallon said. Bush scribbled a response on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

Tallon said that he looked at the note and realized that “there was not a wisp of a plan between the President and Congress to actually make the hard choices, to do the heavy lifting, to balance the budget.”

The note said simply: “Robin, do the right thing.”

Tallon voted no.