Balanced budget amendment: A trap for fiscal conservatives

A law ensuring that government spending doesn't exceed revenue sure sounds good — until you consider what it would cost the GOP

CNN’s Candy Crowley recently asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the many new Republicans on Capitol Hill, whether Paul could bring himself to vote for a raise in the statutory debt ceiling, an issue rapidly approaching the new Tea Party-influenced Congress. Paul’s Tea Party supporters are vocal about their opposition to allowing room for more borrowing and more deficit spending, and perhaps no other freshman senator, other than Marco Rubio, has more prominent ties to the grassroots movement. Countering that pressure is the obvious and critical issue of avoiding a default on U.S. debt service and other obligations, a potential crisis point was driven home by Monday’s warning from Standard & Poor’s on America’s bond rating.

Paul allowed that he would vote for a debt-ceiling hike as a one-time fix — but only if he could guarantee it would be the last debt ceiling hike the U.S. needed. “I would vote to raise the debt ceiling,” Paul told Crowley, “if we passed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and say from here on out, this is the last time we're doing it, we are going to act responsibly.”

Putting aside the merits and demerits of a debt-ceiling hike, the balanced-budget demand is a trap — one that will end up cornering fiscal conservatives in the unlikely event Paul gets what he demands.

First, by the time the U.S. successfully amended the Constitution to require that the government spending does not exceed income, we would likely need several more debt-ceiling raises. To succeed, an amendment must get a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, and then must gain the approval of three-fourths of the states. (Interestingly, the president has no formal role in the process at all.) These requirements pose more than a few obstacles, but the main problem for Paul is time. The process of gaining consent from 38 states would take months, and perhaps years, assuming this Congress could even pass the amendment with the requisite votes.

The U.S. will run up against a debt-ceiling hike within the next several weeks. Paul and others in Congress who offer this as a trade would either have to be clairvoyant to see whether the amendment would succeed, or go on faith alone that Congress and the states would fulfill that part of the bargain Paul demands.