balanced budget amendment

by Jeremy Leaming

A proposed constitutional amendment to mandate a balanced budget has already failed in the House, but senators must also vote on a version before the end of the year as required by the debt-ceiling deal reached in the summer.

Beginning to consider a balanced budget measure, the Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, earlier this week, heard from detractors and supporters of the idea that has been embraced by a slew of states and mulled in Congress for more than a decade. A measure similar to the one the House defeated last month was rejected by Congress in 1995.

Alan B. Morrison, an associate dean of George Washington University Law School for Public Interest and Public Service Law, and a distinguished law professor, told the Subcommittee the balanced budget amendment was a “bad idea,” and urged the Senate to “vote it down and get back to the real work of controlling our deficits.”

Morrison, who helped found Public Citizen Litigation, where he was involved in separation of powers cases, many of which reached the Supreme Court, said, in part, that the proposed amendments would likely shove courts into deciding budgetary matters.

He told senators that “thrusting the courts into budget battles is to me, and I believe to most others who have given the matter any serious thought, a terrible idea. At the very least, it is very strong medicine. But if that is what the sponsors think is needed, they should have the courage to say so. On the other hand, if the cure of judicial review is seen as worse than the ills of an unbalanced budget, Congress should make that clear in the amendment itself. If that option is taken, then the amendment will probably end up being little more than empty rhetoric, to be followed when it is convenient, and ignored when it is not. Meanwhile, serious efforts to bring our spending more in line with our revenues will be put on the back burner while Congress relies on the hope that the balanced budget amendment will do its job.”

Morrison’s entire testimony is available here. Video of the hearing is available on the Subcommittee’s website.

by Nicole Flatow

Passage of a balanced budget amendment would “threaten to tear irrevocably the fabric of our constitutional structure,” warns separation of powers expert Neil Kinkopf in a new ACS Issue Brief.

With the House of Representatives set to vote on a balanced budget amendment proposal this week, Kinkopf’s Issue Brief explains the dangers of inserting policy prescriptions into our founding document.

Kinkopf, a law professor at the Georgia State University, notes that only once in our history did the Constitution dictate an outcome, when the 18th Amendment was passed, but “[s]uch a failure was this deviation from the Constitution’s design that it stands as the only amendment ever to be repealed.”

“The founding generation faced divisive controversies that were every bit as momentous as the present-day budget crisis," Kinkopf writes. "Yet they consciously designed the Constitution not to resolve these issues, instead leaving them to be resolved through the constitutionally ordained process of legislation in compliance with constitutionally guaranteed individual rights.”