Debate on Balanced Budget Intensifies as Vote Nears : Economy: Effort is under way to sway undecided senators. Feinstein backs new plan but says she’d also support Simon’s amendment.

With a Senate vote on the controversial balanced-budget amendment set for early next week, backers and opponents of the measure intensified their efforts Thursday to sway the remaining handful of undecided senators.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was on the doubtful list, declared her co-sponsorship of a new plan offered by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that would revise the proposal for a balanced federal budget by exempting Social Security, creating a capital budget and allowing deficit spending during recessions.

She added, however, that if Reid’s plan fails to win the required two-thirds majority in the Senate, she will vote for the original balanced-budget amendment offered by Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.). Feinstein originally had co-sponsored the Simon proposal but recently was counted among the undecideds after she expressed reservations about it.

Simon claims to have 62 of the 67 votes needed for passage of his proposed amendment, which would require the President to submit a balanced budget to Congress each year. Only a three-fifths vote by the House and Senate could authorize deficit spending.

As proposed, the amendment would take effect in the year 2001.

Passage in the House also would require a two-thirds majority of its membership, or 290 votes. But even if the proposal is approved in both chambers, it still would have to be ratified by 38 state legislatures before it could become part of the Constitution.

The Senate has scheduled back-to-back votes on the competing bills Tuesday, while the House arranged to vote on budget-balancing amendments next month, no matter what the Senate outcome is.

The concept of a balanced budget has been discussed in Congress for more than a decade but record federal deficits in recent years have increased popular support for such a measure.

While proponents contend that it is the only step that will bring a halt to deficit spending, opponents say that it will result either in massive cuts in such popular federal programs as Social Security and Medicare or higher taxes--or both.

In Thursday’s supercharged atmosphere, Reid attacked Simon’s bill, charging that it would put a “fatal chokehold on the American economy” and indicated that he could not vote for it.

But Feinstein apparently found no problem in supporting both proposals.

“Without a constitutional amendment, a balanced budget will never be achieved,” she said in a statement. “I am convinced that, although amending the Constitution is strong medicine that many believe should not be taken . . . without this strong medicine, the patient will die.

“The American people are sitting on a debt time bomb and I believe that without the imposition of an amendment such as this, it will continue to be business as usual,” she said. Feinstein’s Democratic California colleague, Sen. Barbara Boxer, has announced her opposition to the Simon amendment. Opponents, led by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), need 34 votes to block its adoption.

“I think it’s still very, very close,” Simon told reporters. “I don’t think we have 67 votes and I don’t think Byrd has 34 votes--that’s the situation right now.”

Simon denounced Reid’s proposal as “political gamesmanship” that has no chance of passage and charged that it was introduced only to provide a way for some senators to vote for a budget-balancing amendment in an election year without voting for Simon’s plan.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a co-sponsor of Simon’s plan, denounced the Reid amendment as a “cover-your-backside” amendment that would create giant loopholes that would prevent actual balancing of the federal budget.

Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) said that the House would vote on several versions of the amendment, probably on March 14.

Foley, who is opposed to a balanced-budget amendment, said that it might do more harm than good in trying to eliminate the federal deficit.

“It is unenforceable,” Foley said.