PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONSTITUTION : Budget Vote Proves the Founders’ Wisdom : The balance between the Senate and the House ensures steadfastness against runaway popular majorities.

It was a Senate moment. One vote shy of the two-thirds’ majority required to send a constitutional amendment to the states for ratification, the backers of the bill had converged on the one holdout like a phalanx of high-pressure car salesmen on a reluctant buyer.

The target of all this attention and persuasion was not a California senator who represents 30 million people or even a member from a mid-sized place like Tennessee or Minnesota. Rather, it was Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota.

Conrad’s state is a demographic black hole, a place with the lowest rate of population growth. The population of the state, at 639,000, is less than that of the city of San Jose, Calif., and with its heavy reliance on farming and ranching, is hardly typical of the country as a whole. Its four biggest cities have a combined population of less than 300,000. Yet here was Conrad being wheedled and cajoled for his single vote, which would influence profoundly the economic future of a third of a billion people.

Would the men who dreamed up the idea of a two-house national legislature and the provision that both, by an extraordinary supermajority, be required to support any constitutional amendment, have been happy with that vignette of an obdurate senator from an underpopulated state holding out so brazenly against a determined majority? There is absolutely no question but that the answer would be yes, because what has been unfolding on the floor of the U.S. Senate follows, in almost architectural detail, the grand design of the Founding Fathers. And if James Madison were sitting in that gallery high above the Senate floor, he would nod approvingly and perhaps be emboldened to utter a few words of cheer to Conrad.

Two concerns plagued Madison when he was sketching out the plan for the national government. The first was that the majority be heard; the second was that it not have the final word. His concern about legislatures where majorities “yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions” can be shared by anyone who has watched the House of Representatives in its headlong rampage to dismantle the federal government, cut taxes and balance the budget. Madison’s view of the House under Speaker Newt Gingrich might be a place “seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.”

Madison would have acknowledged that the voters sent some kind of message in November, 1994, but would have been more skeptical of its meaning that have been the GOP leaders in the House. He might have noted the fact that about three-fourths of all Americans in most polls support the general idea of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. But his trained eye would also have picked up the fact that when you ask this same majority what programs they would cut to reach that goal, the consensus quickly falls apart. In such cases, it is important to force the majority to pause before proceeding. For this reason, he created the Senate.

There is a world of difference between a majority and a consensus. It is the job of the Senate to underscore that distinction, to make sure everybody is on board before any extensive tampering with the ground rules of government takes place. If the House is the national id, the Senate is the country’s superego. And it doesn’t really matter who in the Senate shows the steadfastness to halt a runaway majority. It can even be a senator from a state that most Americans have never visited and typically confuse with its similarly named neighbor to the south.

Without the Senate, American government would be all sail and no keel. It might also fail to reflect the fact that not all states share the same interests or have the same political culture. Georgians and Oklahomans might be sick of federal programs and gleefully scrap them all; North Dakotans rather like them. And some of the citizens in that unusually well-educated state may even have thought through the implications of the balanced-budget amendment on the government services on which they have come to depend. Madison would have understood that kind of self-interest and insisted that it have a voice.

Madison’s approval of the Senate might be tempered by the fact that many of today’s incumbents hardly match the model of “wisdom and stability” that he hoped they might. Yet even in a chamber that sometimes seems to be dominated by solipsistic windbags and venomous ideologues, enough senators understand the tempering and reflective role that Madison postulated for them, so that when they see their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol erecting so many “monuments to deficient wisdom,” they step in to revoke the building permit.