Amendment Simply A Wretched Idea

In one of life’s great ironies, a Republican Congress next year will pass the thing Bob Dole most would have wanted as president - a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., has enough votes to send the amendment to the states for ratification, with or without President Clinton’s approval.

There’s just one hitch in this triumphal march: The amendment is a gigantically squalid idea.

For one thing, it bruises the spirit of the Constitution. If you look closely at our founding document, you’ll notice it deals primarily with procedural matters; it sets ground rules for the three branches of government and restrains their natural yearnings for power.

But the balanced-budget fillip would change all that by imposing a foreordained outcome on budget deliberations.

Most Americans see no problem with this since Congress seems unable to live frugally on its own. In theory, the change would curb politicians’ desire to use other people’s money in pursuit of higher, abstract goods - such as diversity in the workplace - and lawmakers would begin to view voters’ wallets as objects of veneration rather than lust.

Yet, conservatives ought to know better than to predict a politician’s reaction to new constraints. Just a year ago, for instance, the Newt Gingrich Brigades precipitated a pair of government shutdowns they thought would eviscerate Bill Clinton. Instead, the stunts undid Bob Dole and doomed the speaker of the House to a year of attack ads by the AFL-CIO.

The balanced-budget amendment could set off an era of fiscal responsibility. On the other hand, it also could give Congress a good excuse to impose sweeping taxes on the public - or enact mandates that make working people pick up the cost of election-year promises.

The amendment almost certainly would doom major tax reform, including a flat income tax, because such changes almost certainly would generate budget deficits - at least in their first year.

Ditto for fixing entitlements, even though Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are bankrupting the country. Talk about unintended consequences: The country could go broke because of a balanced-budget decree.

The proposal also assumes Congress can develop unexampled prescience - that it can know in advance how much the economy will grow, how much tax revenue businesses will generate, what the Federal Reserve Board will do with interest rates and so on.

Legislators use dozens of such projections when they calculate budgets. If just one of those indexes fluctuates, spending estimates can go wildly awry. The amendment presumably would force legislators to set things straight by adopting additional taxes or shutting down seemingly “safe” departments and agencies.

And the balanced-budget amendment so beloved by conservatives actually embodies the central tenet of modern liberalism - the idea that one can produce a better society by ordering people to do good things.

Conservatives howl in protest when the Justice Department imposes quotas in the name of “affirmative action” or the Environmental Protection Agency tells businesses precisely how they ought to hold down particulate emissions. But this amendment applies the same type of coercion to Congress.

While it may be tempting to make politicians suffer the same indignities they impose on others, this change would turn the Constitution into a charter for improving humankind through force. This, you may recall, was the evil that inspired the American Revolution.

Republicans may have won their way into legislative dominance, but there’s nothing to guarantee liberals won’t rise again - or that conservatives won’t fall victim to the corrupting temptations of power. Once one has made the Constitution a vehicle for coercive improvement, it’s only a matter of time until pollsters, politicians, media moguls and other powers catch on and convert democracy’s blueprint into a lifestyle manual.

If Republicans want to trim federal spending and respect the rights of working people, they ought to think in terms of procedures rather than results.

The best way to discourage out-of-control government would be to require supermajorities for all increases in spending, taxes and regulations. Such limits would enable Congress to tackle a convoluted tax code and rein in out-of-control spending while reviving the ideal that lawmakers can’t spend our money without our consent.

Now that the Republicans have become the nation’s majority party, they can afford to govern through persuasion and consent rather than resort to constitutional gewgaws such as amendments to protect school prayer or make Congress live within its means.

In our system of government, he micromanages best who micromanages least. Republicans who want to balance the budget ought to embrace the adage: Just do it.

They shouldn’t play dice with the Constitution just to provide cover for their failure to balance the books today.

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