Nancy Kassebaum: “I rise in strong opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment to balance the budget. This is an issue we have…”

“I rise in strong opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment to balance the budget. This is an issue we have debated before. I opposed it then. I oppose it now. I may be wrong, Mr. President, but at least I have been consistently wrong. I still believe this remains a sham. I would like to go through a little bit of the history of the debate that I think is revealing and consider three events. In 1982, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment to balance the budget by 69 votes. It failed in the House of Representatives at that time. Only 2 years later, I helped lead an effort on the Senate floor to freeze Federal spending across the board for 1 year. This included the COLA's, it included everything for just 1 year. We got 33 votes. That is revealing, I think, Mr. President, that 69 Senators would vote to declare in the Constitution that the budget should be balanced but fewer than half that many would vote even to temporarily stop the growth of the budget. To put it another way, two-thirds of the Members of this body thought amending the Constitution was less painful than to freeze spending. In 1986, the Senate again voted on a balanced budget amendment, this time narrowly rejecting it with 66 votes in favor. One year later, I again helped propose a 1-year budget freeze. This time we got only 25 votes. Nearly two-thirds of the Senate would amend the constitution but only one-fourth would freeze the budget for 1 year.”