Orrin Hatch: “I am so pleased conservative leaders such as Ed Meese, Dick Thornburgh, and Ken Blackwell have stood in support of a…”

“I am so pleased conservative leaders such as Ed Meese, Dick Thornburgh, and Ken Blackwell have stood in support of a strong balanced budget amendment. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this point the op-eds to which I just referred. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From Bloomberg.com, July 20, 2011] Deficits Need Balanced-Budget Amendment Fix (By Dick Thornburgh) A late entrant in the budget deficit-debt ceiling talkathon in Washington is increasing support for a constitutional requirement that the federal budget be balanced every year. Liberals will no doubt characterize this proposal as a nutty one, but careful scrutiny of such an amendment to our constitution demonstrates its potential to prevent future train wrecks in the budgeting process. Constitutional budget-balancing requirements are already available to most governors and state legislatures, along with a line-item veto and separate capital budgeting, which differentiates investments from current outlays. They work. Any debate in Congress will probably include the following arguments against a balanced-budget amendment: First, that the amendment would clutter our basic document in a way contrary to the intention of the Founding Fathers. This is clearly wrong. The framers of the Constitution contemplated that amendments would be necessary to keep it abreast of the times. It has, in fact, been amended 27 times.…”