Idaho’s Sen. Mike Crapo says balanced budget vote could come this year

It’s been 20 years and more than $53 trillion since Larry Craig came up one vote short in his quest for a balanced budget amendment.

Throughout his 28-year congressional career, the Idaho Republican was a leading advocate of amending the Constitution to require the federal government to spend less each year than it collects in revenue.

The closest a balanced budget resolution ever came to passage was 1995, during Craig’s first term in the Senate. After the House approved it, he and others began lining up support in the Senate.

“The lobbying was very intense,” Craig said recently. “I traveled around the country with the economist Milton Friedman, advocating for it.”

Counting votes in advance, he knew the Senate lacked the two-thirds majority needed to secure passage and send the amendment to the states for ratification. Six Democrats who previously supported balanced-budget efforts switched sides after being pressured by President Bill Clinton. Senate Appropriations Chairman Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., also refused to sign on, calling the amendment a “political gimmick.”

“I went into (Senate Majority Leader) Bob Dole’s office and told him I was one vote short,” Craig said. “I asked if he’d help, and he said no. Hatfield was a man of conviction. If Dole tried to force his support, he’d resign. So he wouldn’t help. I look back on it now and think, ‘Oh my, how different things would be.’ I don’t think anyone dreamed the deficits would be where they’re at now. If they had, I’d have gotten that last vote.”

Since 1995, total federal outlays have amounted to $52.6 trillion, or $8.7 trillion more than receipts. Annual deficits have grown from the $200 billion range to as much as $1.4 trillion. When other off-budget borrowing and war spending is added in, the national debt supporting this fiscal activity has almost quadrupled, to $18.15 trillion.

CRAPO: WE’LL HAVE A VOTE, BUT ...

Now, with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate for the first time since the Bush administration, there’s speculation a balanced budget amendment will once again be part of the congressional agenda.

U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, said he’s “confident” Republican leaders will bring the issue up for a vote during this session of Congress.

However, “I don’t have a high level of confidence we can get over the top – at least on the first try,” he said. “Historically, it’s been very hard to get a two-thirds majority, and this Congress still has some significant partisan battles.”

The fate of a balanced-budget amendment “ultimately depends on whether the American people weigh in,” he said. “If they’re engaged, I think they can have a real impact on the outcome.”

Like Craig in the ’90s, Crapo has been beating the drums for fiscal discipline. In town hall meetings across the state, he regularly discusses the budget situation, noting annual interest payments on the national debt will soon exceed discretionary or defense spending, which together account for most government operations outside of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

“I think a balanced-budget amendment would have a significant impact (on federal borrowing and spending),” he said. “It’s not an absolute solution — it would still be possible for Congress to find a way out from under it — but it’s probably a stronger control than any other solution on the table.”

FISCAL BEHAVIOR SHOWS LACK OF RESTRAINT

Although Congress doesn’t need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, it hasn’t found the will to do so on its own.

Wayne Hammon, executive director of Idaho Associated General Contractors, recalls working for Craig in the late ’90s as a legislative assistant. He was in the office late one evening when the phone rang. It was a desperate appropriations committee staffer, saying he had to find a place to stick some extra money. There was a meeting the next day and he wanted everything neat and organized. He’d called all the committee member offices, and Hammon was the only one who answered. Where did he want it?

“So I got $50 million for Idaho because I answered the phone at 1:30 in the morning,” Hammon said.

That kind of fiscal behavior is why federal budget surpluses have been generated only five times in the past 50 years — once in 1969, and again from 1998 to 2001.

All of the surpluses were due almost entirely to strong Social Security receipts, which offset deficits in the operating budget, rather than substantive improvements in fiscal practices. Even from ’98 to ’01, debt levels continued to rise because of additional off-budget borrowing. The only decrease in the national debt in the last half-century came in 1969.

Congress made repeated attempts at self-regulation throughout this period, but all were dismal failures.

The first statutory balanced budget requirement, for example, ended in 1981 with the largest deficit in history up to that time. The 1985 Gramm-Rudman Act, 1990 Budget Enforcement Act, 1997 Balanced Budget Act and 2011 Budget Control Act were similarly ineffective.

Crapo said two factors make it difficult for Congress to rein itself in.

First, entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid now accounts for more than two-thirds of the entire federal budget.

“Entitlement spending isn’t appropriated every year,” he said. “It’s on auto-pilot, and it continues to grow whether the economy keeps up with it or not.”

Congress could change this, he said, but it takes 60 votes in the Senate to overcome procedural hurdles just to consider the issue. Any change would also take the concurrence of the House, and if the president vetoes it, a two-thirds majority would be needed to override.

“So the first huge problem is that the process doesn’t allow Congress to work on the entire budget every year without having a supermajority,” Crapo said.

The second hurdle is that congressional rules make it relatively easy to ignore budget limits.

For example, while the 2011 Budget Control Act put spending caps in place until 2021 (as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling), Congress can ignore the caps in an emergency — and it gets to decide what constitutes an emergency.

“Congress has a nearly perfect record of breaking every budget it’s adopted, because it’s so easy to do under the current process,” Crapo said.

SCHOLAR: CONGRESS KNOWS AMENDMENT IS ‘A FRAUD’

Constitutional scholar Lou Fisher, who spent 35 years with the Congressional Research Service, said this lack of adherence to self-imposed rules raises questions about the sincerity of balanced-budget supporters.

“I think it would be awfully damaging for Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment and have people see it ultimately doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “It wouldn’t produce a balanced budget. Members (of Congress) know it’s a fraud but are willing to sign on as long as they’re sure it won’t pass.”

The relatively short history of balanced-budget votes lends some credence to this theory.

Congress has only voted on the amendment 14 times, despite apparent widespread support for the concept. The first came in 1982, when it passed the Senate but failed in the House. The last was 2011, when both bodies failed to achieve a two-thirds majority.

Between 1995 and 2011, the House never voted on an amendment, even though Republicans were in the majority most of that time. The measure failed by a single vote three times in the Senate, most recently in 1997.

News reports at the time indicated the ’95 amendment could have passed if language was added exempting Social Security. House Republicans agreed, but the Senate refused because it would have required deeper cuts in discretionary and defense spending — or higher taxes.

Ideological “poison pills” of various types have now become a common feature of balanced budget proposals, almost guaranteeing they’ll never achieve the two-thirds majority.

For example, a dozen amendment resolutions have been introduced so far this year. Most require a two-thirds or three-fifths vote to increase taxes and/or debt levels — something that’s unpalatable to most Democrats, since it virtually assures the budget would be balanced primarily through entitlement cuts. Others limit total outlays to 18 percent of the gross domestic product — a level that has only been achieved five times in the past 50 years, which again puts the burden on entitlements.

U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, said that if lawmakers choose to balance the budget by raising taxes, rather than cutting spending, he’s confident the American people will hold them accountable.

“I’m willing to take that vote,” Labrador said. “Right now we have conservatives who don’t want to raise taxes and liberals who don’t want to cut spending, so we just keep borrowing and nobody pays a political price.”

Craig said the tax-or-cut nature of a balanced budget amendment can act as a self-correcting mechanism to encourage fiscal discipline. That’s apparent in Idaho, which has a constitutional prohibition against excess spending.

“Idaho can’t deficit spend. The Legislature knows this and understands it,” Craig said. “The balanced budget requirement provides the framework that lets legislators know what they can and can’t do. It creates the mindset that brings about enforcement — whereas the mindset in Congress today is the farthest thing possible from a balanced budget.”

This story was originally published May 25, 2015 at 10:37 PM.