Constitution Fine Just The Way It Is

The United States does not need to amend its Constitution. We just need to use the one we have.

Term limits? A balanced budget? To achieve those goals, the Constitution gives us all the tools we need.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned term-limits laws in 23 states, some conservative politicians promised they’d work to get term limits into the Constitution. What a waste of energy. Weren’t they paying attention last November? Simply by marking their ballots, voters booted long-time incumbents from coast to coast. This familiar old constitutional process caused a political power shift far more dramatic than term limitations could achieve.

Meanwhile, if the new office holders don’t use their power to change the policies of government, they’ll get the boot, too.

Nothing ranks higher, among the voters’ well-justified concerns, than deficit spending. Conservatives have postured against the deficits for years, with procedural reforms such as the Gramm-Rudman law and the balanced-budget amendment. But now they can reduce the deficit directly.

And Congress, to its credit, is doing so! Republicans in both the House and Senate, thanks to their new majority, have drafted budget outlines that will guide appropriators through the details of cutting federal spending.

The details will change, in months to come.

They’ll change in response to a sturdy old constitutional process that has proved its mettle through two centuries of political controversy. Americans will raise hell, and their representatives will respond.

The Republicans call for eliminating three departments (education, commerce and energy); 13 agencies, including Legal Services Corporation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; hundreds of programs and subsidies, including Amtrak, National Endowment for the Arts, tech-prep vocational education, Charter Schools, highway demonstration projects, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program. They plan to trim the growth rate in Medicare and Medicaid spending. They duck Social Security reform. They propose to let defense spending grow, though at a pace slower than inflation.

Those proposals can be improved upon. And perhaps they will be, because we have a system of government that does not need to be improved upon.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board