Amendment to Balance Budget Likely Doomed

Apparently ending the Republican-led drive for a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced federal budget, a fence-sitting Democratic senator skewered the GOP’s top legislative priority by renouncing his previous support for the measure.

Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey--who voted for a nearly identical proposal two years ago as a member of the House--announced Wednesday his intention to vote against the balanced-budget amendment in the Senate, apparently denying the GOP its top political goal for the 105th Congress.

Although Senate debate on the proposal will continue until an expected floor vote Tuesday, the outcome appears locked in place: The amendment has 66 supporters, one short of the necessary two-thirds majority needed for adoption. With Torricelli’s announcement, 34 senators--all Democrats--have said they will oppose the measure.

“I have struggled with this decision more than any that I have ever made in my life,” the first-term senator declared at a crowded news conference. He said that he reached his conclusion because of concerns that the amendment as drafted could threaten national defense, limit infrastructure investment and prolong future economic downturns because it would not give the government the flexibility to go into debt.

Acknowledging that he campaigned as a supporter of a balanced-budget amendment to win his Senate seat, Torricelli said: “I believe . . . I was elected to exercise my best judgment for the country, and that’s what I did.”

If the expected votes hold and the measure fails in the Senate, House leaders said they have no intention of forcing a vote on the matter in their chamber.

“I’m disappointed, terribly disappointed,” an emotional Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said after Torricelli’s announcement. Hatch, who has led the floor fight for the amendment, added: “It’s been a tough battle, and it’s not over yet. I don’t want to mislead you. It’s uphill.”

The White House, meanwhile, was cheered by Torricelli’s decision. Even as President Clinton has pushed a plan to balance the budget by 2002, administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, have opposed the amendment strongly, arguing that it would restrict the government’s authority to deal with fiscal crises and could imperil federal programs such as Social Security.

“Balancing the budget only requires Congress’ vote and my signature,” Clinton said last weekend in his national radio address. “It does not require [the nation] to rewrite our Constitution. We must balance the budget, but a balanced-budget amendment could cause more harm than good.”

The GOP’s proposed amendment would require the federal government to balance its books every year starting in 2002 at the latest. The measure would not prohibit deficits but would make red-ink spending difficult because a three-fifths majority in Congress would be required to authorize deficit spending, tax increases and federal borrowing.

Democrats barely beat back a similar GOP-led effort to rewrite the Constitution in 1995. The balanced-budget measure that year passed the House but failed in the Senate by one vote. That bitter defeat became a GOP campaign cry last year as backers pledged to revisit the issue this year.

Indeed, GOP leaders entered the current legislative session confident that they would get 67 or more votes. Their optimism stemmed, in part, from last November’s elections, which produced two additional Republicans and four Democratic senators who campaigned on their support for the measure.

Two of those Democrats--Max Cleland of Georgia and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana--stood by their pledges. But even before Torricelli’s reversal, Tim Johnson of South Dakota decided to oppose the GOP’s proposed amendment.

Like Torricelli, Johnson voted for the measure as a House member in 1995.

Earlier Wednesday, Republicans turned aside two modifications to their balanced-budget amendment, despite the contention of some Democratic supporters that the alterations would change enough minds to produce votes needed to pass the amendment.

The first, proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), would have allowed changing the Constitution if the amendment excluded Social Security from the federal budget after fiscal 2003. It was defeated, 67 to 33.

Torricelli offered another modification that would have created a separate budget for capital improvement projects that would have been outside the budget and thus unaffected by the amendment. It failed, 63 to 37. More than two dozen additional amendments--including one by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)--are expected to be acted on by the Senate before the final vote on the amendment.

“A bipartisan version could have been drafted if [Democrats’] concerns had been addressed,” Torricelli said.

Hatch dismissed the Democrats’ amendments as “game playing” to defeat the larger balanced-budget proposal. “Every one of those amendments would make it impossible to reach a balanced budget,” he said, adding that Republicans will abandon the cause if their measure is altered.

“We know if we change it, we lose it,” Hatch said.