As Deficits Mount, Amendment to Require Balanced Budgets Fails in House

WASHINGTON — With tax rates falling, spending rising and deficits soaring, House Republicans dusted off a long-debated proposal Thursday to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget — only to watch it fail.

The amendment was supported by 233 House members but opposed by 184 others, leaving it well short of the two-thirds support needed for approval under the Constitution. The amendment was almost certainly going nowhere, since it would have needed a two-thirds vote in the Senate as well, followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states.

In the abstract, the vote Thursday was an opportunity for Republicans in the House to demonstrate their concern for the government’s fiscal health, even if recent actions by their party suggested otherwise. But the symbolic move was derided on both sides of the aisle.

“It is an effort to fool the American people into believing that this Congress is financially responsible when, quite clearly, based on the votes of the past year, it is wholly and completely irresponsible,” said Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who nonetheless voted for the proposal.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by the Koch brothers, was similarly unimpressed.

“If lawmakers think they can use a balanced-budget amendment as a fig leaf of fiscal responsibility after just voting for such an irresponsible spending bill,” he said, “they should think again.”

It has been a painful few months for those worried about growing budget deficits. In December, Republicans celebrated the passage of an overhaul of the tax code, which the Congressional Budget Office now says will add nearly $1.9 trillion to budget deficits from 2018 to 2028, a figure that includes lost revenue as well as additional interest costs.

This year, Congress approved a two-year budget deal to increase strict limits on military and domestic spending, and lawmakers subsequently approved a $1.3 trillion spending plan that provides big increases in funding.

On Monday, the budget office released an updated forecast that took into account the tax bill and the spending legislation, and the consequences were grim. The deficit is now projected to exceed $1 trillion in 2020, and deficits over the next decade are expected to total $11.7 trillion, up from the $10.1 trillion that had been expected in June.

“This Congress and this administration likely will go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and Congresses that we’ve had,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., observed this week.

Yet on Thursday afternoon, House Republicans took to the floor of their chamber to proclaim the peril of the rising national debt, which has topped $21 trillion. For Republicans, the debate over the proposal amounted to an opportunity to vent — but not much more than that.

Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va., the proposal’s sponsor, said the constitutional amendment would apply needed “external pressure” to force Congress to make difficult decisions — a “stop me before I kill again” argument that has long propelled the balanced budget amendment.

“It’s time for Congress to stop saddling future generations with the burden of crushing debts to pay for current spending,” Goodlatte said. “We should not pass on to our children and grandchildren the bleak fiscal future that our unsustainable spending is creating.”

But the attempted display of fiscal responsibility did little to soothe some conservative critics of the Republicans’ recent spending spree.

“The base does not want to see a stupid bad bill and then go get patted on their head,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group.

Amending the Constitution to require the federal government to have a balanced budget has been discussed for decades, and proposed amendments failed in the House and Senate in 2011. The vote held Thursday fulfilled a commitment that the Republican leadership in the House had made to conservative lawmakers last year.

But Democrats assailed Republicans for preaching fiscal responsibility not long after voting for a tax bill that is projected to widen deficits. They warned that the proposal, if it ever became reality, would lead to deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, programs that are driving up spending as the population ages.

“Like some stormy sermon from Trump on the virtues of chastity, I believe these House Republicans today really do deserve a gold medal for hypocrisy,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas.

In addition, economists critical of the idea of a balanced-budget amendment argue that it would essentially tie the hands of the government in the event of a recession, making economic conditions even worse.

Lawmakers are already looking toward coming up with spending legislation for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. By going back on what had been a bipartisan agreement, future negotiations would presumably become more difficult.

On Thursday, House Republicans also unveiled their farm bill, which includes significant new work requirements for recipients of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food aid for around 40 million low-income Americans.