Push to Amend

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Some White House advisers were concerned that the move would merely make the President look cynical. Others insisted Ronald Reagan had to reassure conservative voters that he remains committed to a balanced budget, even though he is proposing the biggest deficits in history. In his speech to the nation last week, Reagan chose the reassurance route. He called on Congress to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets as the only method by which "we can stop the Government's squandering, overtaxing ways."

Reagan's support just might give the proposal the extra push it needs to pass Congress this year. Fifty-two Senators are sponsoring an amendment that would require Congress each fiscal year to keep "total expenditures" (including outlays not now counted in the formal budget) equal to or below total receipts. In the House, 202 Congressmen have signed to sponsor an identical amendment and are discussing a petition to force it out of the Judiciary Committee, where it has been bottled up.

The legislators are reacting to grass-roots sentiment that has led 31 states—three short of the number needed—to pass resolutions demanding that a constitutional convention be called to write a balanced-budget amendment. The trouble with such a convention is that it could not be limited to that one issue. For that reason, most congressional supporters of the amendment would rather follow the traditional path of having it passed by two-thirds of the House and the Senate and then ratified by at least 38 states within seven years. Opponents of the amendment had thought, before the President spoke, that they could keep it sidetracked; now they are worried.

In any case, there is no guarantee that an amendment would actually lead to balanced budgets. The Senate version, for example, would permit deficit spending if 60% of the members of each chamber of Congress voted for it. Besides that, revenues and expenditures are notoriously difficult to estimate, and no one has figured out what the legal situation would be if Congress, by accident or design, voted a set of figures that looked plausible but proved wrong. An amendment, predicts Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, a public interest lobby, "is going to lead to all kinds of games, like two sets of books—one for the amendment, and the real one."