Senate set to vote on balanced budget amendments

WASHINGTON — Congress will try again to force itself to mend its profligate spending habits when the Senate votes on proposals to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget every year.

The House several weeks ago failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed to advance a constitutional amendment. The Senate is expected to fall short Wednesday when it votes on dueling Republican and Democratic proposals mandating that the federal government balance its books.

Republicans, and a minority of Democrats, argue that a balanced budget requirement is essential if the government is ever to emerge from an age of $1 trillion-a-year deficits. But most Democrats say it would put the government in a fiscal straitjacket in which it would have to make massive cuts in social programs and be unable to respond to economic downturns.

The Senate came within one vote of approving a balanced budget twice in the 1990s, but it hasn't taken up the issue since the last vote in 1997. This time the vote, a condition of the debt ceiling agreement reached last August, is not expected to be as close.

The House last month voted 261-165 in favor of a GOP-written balanced budget proposal, 23 votes short of a two-thirds majority.

Senators can choose between two versions. The Republican proposal, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and backed by all 47 Senate Republicans, would require that spending not exceed revenues in any one fiscal year. It would necessitate a two-thirds majority to raise taxes and set a cap on federal spending of 18 percent of gross domestic product.

"The record is clear," Hatch said. "Absent the constitutional restraint of a balanced budget amendment, Congress and the president do not make the tough choices. Instead, they take the path of least resistance."

The budgetary constrictions could be waived by a majority if there is a formal declaration of war; by a three-fifths vote if the country is involved in a military conflict constituting a threat to national security; or if two-thirds of both the House and the Senate approve a deficit.

The Democratic alternative, sponsored by Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, has no spending caps or supermajorities for tax increases. It requires that the budget be balanced unless three-fifths of each chamber vote to waive it for national emergencies. It protects Social Security from being raided as a means of balancing the rest of the budget. Tax cuts for people earning more than $1 million a year would not be allowed unless the budget is in surplus.