Senate Keeps Social Security Tied to Budget

The Senate refused on Tuesday to strip Social Security funds from calculations in the GOP-sponsored balanced-budget amendment, but a key Democratic senator declared support for the amendment.

Proponents are now within one vote of the two-thirds majority needed for passage in the chamber.

By a 55-44 vote, the legislators turned back the controversial proposal offered by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). If passed, the proposal would have removed the Social Security Trust Fund from the federal budget.

“This is serious business,” Reid said before his amendment came to the floor for a vote. “We’re dealing with the most successful social program in the history of the world.”

Reid’s proposal would have separated the Social Security program from the federal government’s general budget. Otherwise, Reid and other Democratic leaders said, a balanced-budget amendment could force higher Social Security taxes or lower benefits if federal spending had to be cut to match revenue.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chief sponsor of the amendment, ridiculed the Democrats’ use of Social Security as a “risky gimmick” to scare voters and kill the measure in the Senate. “Everybody knows that if the Reid amendment passes, this balanced-budget amendment is going to go down,” he said.

Hours before the vote, freshman Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana appeared at her first solo news conference to announce her reluctant support for the balanced-budget amendment. Unsmiling and looking grim-faced, she described the GOP-proposal as flawed and urged her colleagues to vote for alternative versions offered by Democrats.

One of those alternatives, proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would exclude Social Security from the budget after fiscal 2003. The Feinstein amendment is expected to come up for debate and a vote today.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders are pressing ahead in their effort to pass the amendment. Their proposed amendment would require a three-fifths vote of Congress to approve deficit spending.

But before the amendment can be added to the Constitution, it must not only be approved by two-thirds of members in both houses of Congress but also ratified by three-fourths of the nation’s state legislatures.

The House is waiting for the Senate to act before it takes up the amendment. Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) told reporters Tuesday that he counted “about 66” votes for the measure, one less than needed.

Thus, the focus of attention turned to the remaining Democratic fence-sitter: Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a first-term senator who supported the balanced-budget amendment two years ago as a member of the House.

Torricelli told reporters Tuesday that he was not ready to announce his position but would do so today. “We’re not doing anything now,” he said.

Some legislative sources said that Torricelli leans against the measure but does not want to say so until after an alternate version he supports is debated and voted on in the Senate. As of late Tuesday, the Democrats had not completed filing nearly two dozen planned amendments to the measure.

“I think momentum is on our side,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said at a morning news conference. He was joined by other amendment opponents, who signed their names to a grass-roots petition drive that Democratic lawmakers claimed already has 800,000 signatures calling for the rejection of any balanced-budget measure that imperils Social Security.

After Landrieu’s announcement, the minority leader said: “Our momentum has lost a couple of wheels.” But he added: “I think it is entirely possible we could win this.”

If, as expected, all alternatives to the proposed amendment fail, Landrieu said that she would vote “with reservations” for the Hatch version when it reaches the floor next week. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said.

Her vote would be based largely on her pledge during her campaign to support a balanced-budget amendment if and when it came up during her first year in Washington, she said.

Asked if her campaign promises were “an uneducated decision” made without full understanding of the federal budget process, Landrieu appeared to concur.