Senator Byrd once called the balanced budget amendment a “pneumatic excrescence.” Whatever that means it sure doesn’t sound good. He explained the meaning as a wart full of wind. Only an orator like Robert C. Byrd, who meticulously studied his Webster’s Dictionary as well as his Bible and the U.S. Constitution, could come up with a term like that.
The balanced budget amendment has been waved about for decades as the cure-all of American economic woes. Senator Byrd was on both sides of the issue for a while. He spoke against it in 1979, he voted for it in 1982, and then voted against it in 1986. Some would call this waffling on the issue, but I see it as the mark of a man who was willing to learn and to change. Few American politicians of the last half century studied the issue of the balanced budget amendment more thoroughly. For the next quarter century, Senator Byrd would remain a leading spokesman on the follies of the balanced budget amendment, while, at the same time working hard through the political process to achieve a balanced budget and control the national debt.
Writing in 1979 in his weekly column called the Byrd’s Eye View, Senator Byrd said that the goal should always be to balance the budget, but that an amendment to the Constitution “could endanger the nation’s security and economic health by its inherent inflexibility.” He did not want Congress to end up in a constitutional straightjacket that would prevent a quick response to disasters, emergencies, wars, and economic down-turns.
He understood the fallacy of the argument that many states had balanced budget requirements in their state constitutions and the federal government should be no different. “State governments do not have such responsibilities as national defense and security,” he responded. And furthermore, he wrote: “many states have two budgets; one for government operating expenses, which must balance, and one for capital outlay or construction projects, which need not balance.”
By 1994 the Republican Party’s “Contract with America,” helped Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. The Contact called for sweeping reforms including a balanced budget amendment, which passed the House on January 26, 1995, with a vote of 300-132, with 72 Democrats joining Republicans in its passage. When the amendment got to the Senate it was rejected by a very narrow margin with 65 for and 35 against. This vote required a two-thirds majority for passage.
Senator Byrd, along with Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, led the Senate’s effort to oppose the balanced budget amendment, with Senator Byrd calling it “an immense hoax.” If the votes were there to pass this amendment, he said, the House and the Senate had enough votes “in both Houses to pass real legislation now that would effectively bring the budget into balance.” He was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor that the balanced budget amendment’s “proponents are selling this amendment very much as the oldtime vaudeville peddlers sold tonic and liniments, kidney pills, and snake oil.”
Polls taken in the past and those taken recently show that many Americans favor a balanced budget amendment. Senator Byrd saw these results as a flaw in the polling process. He thought the pollsters should ask the question another way: “What specific taxes would you raise, and what specific entitlements and other mandatory funding programs would you cut, in order to balance the budget? When it comes to the specifics, the silence is deafening,” Byrd wrote 17 years ago.
In the abstract, with no people or programs, or tough decisions attached, a balanced budget amendment seems reasonable. But slogans and abstractions are no way to govern. Political campaigns can go a long way on slogans but the hard choices members of Congress need to make in order to do their constitutional duty to govern are vastly different than heated campaign rhetoric. Who gains and who loses when specific programs are cut to balance the budget? Answering these questions requires governance, not slogans, and it requires tough compromises, not lines in the sand.