It was pretty obvious by the end of the Clinton presidency that the proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution was dead. The nation was enjoying its largest surpluses ever, we were on track to pay off the entirety of the national debt within the next decade, and no one from either party was anxious to return to the days of massive deficits.
A gimmick written into constitutional stone was obviously unnecessary — all it took was reliable governing, fiscal sanity, and a leader who cared about responsible budget policies.
That was four short years ago. Now, under Bush’s stewardship, we have the biggest deficits in American history and a long-term fiscal disaster looming ahead.
At first I thought this was some kind of bad joke, but it appears that House Republicans, who have helped create the mess in the first place, are resuscitating the gimmick Clinton killed years ago.
House Republicans will vote this year on a constitutional balanced-budget amendment for the first time since 1995, when the issue was the cornerstone of the Contract with America that helped them gain control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Shortly before the Memorial Day recess, Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) promised Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.) a vote on the proposal, which was the first of 10 measures the new Republican majority promised to bring to the floor in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. DeLay’s promise reaffirmed a commitment he made to Istook last September to take up the balanced-budget amendment.
This is one of those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me kind of stories.
House Republicans, including DeLay and Istook, have voted in lock step with Bush’s wishes for reckless tax cuts for the wealthy, massive spending for a voluntary war, and a costly new addition to Medicare that benefits drug manufacturers and insurance companies and no one else. And now these same fools want to alter the Constitution to prevent them from adopting their own policies.
The promised vote on the balanced-budget amendment comes as part of a larger apparent effort by the Republican Party to return to its roots of fiscal conservatism in the face of record budget deficits piled up by the Bush administration.
No, no, a thousand times no. For the GOP to “return to its roots of fiscal conservatism,” the party has to actually start adopting fiscally conservative budgetary policies, not endorsing gimmicks that have nothing to do with reality.
Publicly, DeLay has said that the amendment has no chance of passing. But GOP leadership aides say privately that such a vote is politically awkward because it could open their party to Democratic charges of hypocrisy because the federal deficit has soared to a record high under their stewardship.
It also undermines the argument that many Republicans have made since the budget surpluses of the ’90s vanished after the attacks Sept. 11, 2001, that deficits don’t matter.
This is so typical. When Republican lawmakers are asked to vote on budgets and tax cuts, they throw caution to the wind and rack up unprecedented debts. When those same lawmakers are asked to fix their mess, they prefer stunts to governing.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so ridiculous.