Turtle Politics

Slowing the budget balancers

We've got a message and we want to send it." So proclaimed Republican Eugene Lamkin, majority leader of the Indiana house of representatives, last week as his colleagues voted to join the legislatures of 28 other states in calling for a constitutional convention to adopt an amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. With the approval of only five more states, Congress may be forced to convene what would be the first constitutional convention since the Founding Fathers met in 1787.

Lamkin's message has clearly been received by Washington. Both Congress and the White House are paying increasing attention to the burgeoning grass-roots feeling that the Government has lost control of federal expenditures and that chronic deficit spending is fueling inflation. But just how well Washington understands the message is another matter.

The White House has taken a low-key approach, forming a task force to gently persuade uncommitted state legislators to vote against budget-balancing resolutions. A key target is New Hampshire, which holds hearings this week. Expected to testify on behalf of the proposals is California Governor Jerry Brown, who has made opposition to deficit financing a central theme of his pre-presidential campaign. Another target is Ohio, where a legislator received a letter from Jimmy Carter denouncing the amendment as "political gimmickry" that would be "so filled with loopholes as to be meaningless or so rigid as to tie the nation's hands in time of war or depression."

Democratic congressional leaders, meanwhile, insist that they are sympathetic to demands for a balanced budget but do not want to risk the potential chaos of a convention or the straitjacket that an amendment could place on economic policy. These legislators argue that they should take no action until after full discussion. But to some critics, this seems like a strategy for stretching out hearings in the hope that the public's interest will wane before a the public's interest will wane before a vote has to be taken. The Senate held one hearing in early March and is not scheduled to hold another for weeks.

The House Judiciary Committee, with 68 different budget-balancing schemes before it, held its first hearings last week and then recessed until later this spring. "Launching a turtle," scoffed a committee aide. Retorted Chairman Peter Rodino: "The turtle may go slowly, but it gets there."

The handful of witnesses before the committee were divided. Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, a leading liberal economist from M.I.T., argued that a budget-balancing amendment would be "suicidal [because] economics is so inexact a science and the future is so unpredictable." Conservative Economist Arthur Burns, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, counseled Congress to enact a law requiring a balanced budget "and then, if it works well, take the constitutional route." Another conservative, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, "with great reluctance" conceded that some form of amendment is "the only way in which we can permanently curb [deficit spending]."

How well the Democrats' "turtle" strategy against the amendment will work is in doubt. Only shrewd parliamentary maneuvering by Senate Democratic leaders last week prevented passage of a Republican-sponsored amendment as part of the bill increasing the national debt limit to $830 billion from $798 billion. In place of the G.O.P. measure, the Democrats substituted a diluted rider that requires congressional budget committees to draw up a balanced budget for fiscal 1981 and 1982. But the amendment does not bind Congress to adopt the committees' recommendations. Complained Kansas Republican Senator Robert Dole: "This is a hoax."

The Senate's lame measure comes before the House this week. And there it could be in trouble. A potential majority, composed of Republicans and conservative Democrats, seems determined to enact legislation that would bring the Federal Government closer to balancing its budget. Even if they fail this time, the budget balancers are certain to keep trying.

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