Russ Feingold: “I note a little over a year ago this body rejected this proposed amendment. A great deal has happened since then, but…”

“I note a little over a year ago this body rejected this proposed amendment. A great deal has happened since then, but none of the fundamental flaws of the joint resolution have been corrected. It still raises serious problems related to the role of the courts and the power it might confer on unelected judges to set our national budget policy. It remains a serious and real threat to Social Security. It continues to risk expansion of Presidential impoundment authority. Madam President, all of these faults are still there, they still remain. But there have been significant events in the last year that do bear on the proposed constitutional amendment, and they go to the very heart of the arguments put forward by the proponents of the constitutional amendment. The central reason offered by the proponents of the amendment is that without this constitutional mandate we will not balance the budget. That argument was appealing but ultimately unpersuasive a year ago. It remains unpersuasive today. Prior to the vote in 1995, President Clinton and the 103d Congress had just finished cutting the deficit in half--the first time for 3 years in a row that the deficit had gone down, and not just by a little bit, but by half.…”