Liberal Democrats would be speaking that way about President Clinton, if they had Churchill’s flair for disparagement. Clinton was, they think, bad enough before the election. Then he signed the welfare legislation that repealed a 60-year-old entitlement, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, promising vaguely to fix things after the election (a promise that presupposed a Democratic Congress). And although he had denounced the Defense of Marriage Act, which opposes same-sex marriages, as gay-bashing, he ran ads on Christian radio stations preening about having signed it.
Things were supposed to be better after the election when, living under the term limits imposed by the Twenty-second Amendment, he could, for almost the first time in his adult life, stop campaigning and stand for something. But just one week after the election, liberals were seething over what seemed to be his supine acceptance of the inevitability of a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets. What he said was that although ““I don’t believe we need’’ the amendment, he could live with it if it contains a provision to manage ““a recession’’–say, requiring just a simple majority to pass an imbalanced budget during an economic contraction, rather than the amendment’s two-thirds requirement for such a budget.
Several senior aides flew to the phones to spread the word that Clinton’s opposition to the amendment was undiminished and he intends to fight it. Such efforts at controlling Clinton’s self-inflicted damage have become so familiar that they call to mind the jest that when George Romney sought the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, reporters had keys on their typewriters which, when struck, typed the phrase ““Romney later explained.’’ Clinton’s stance–slouch, actually–regarding the amendment raises the most pertinent question about the remainder of his public life: For what is he hoarding his political capital? If he will not take an unpopular stand now, and on a matter of constitutional gravity, when will he?
Clinton may have learned some things about campaigning from his study of Ronald Reagan, but Clinton is the quintessential un-Reagan president. Reagan believed in husbanding his claims on the public’s attention so that he could use those claims to advance a few large themes–redefining the government’s domestic scope, winning the Cold War. Clinton’s ““mayorization’’ of the presidency–Fiorello La Guardia in the White House–consists of being constantly visible but usually concerning himself with matters that are barely visible, such as school uniforms, drug tests for adolescents seeking drivers’ licenses and the length of hospital stays for this or that procedure.
But surely he is not so hollow that he will flinch from a fight against the amendment. The fight comes at a moment that is as close as opponents are apt to come to a propitious moment for fighting this perennially popular amendment. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the deficit is smaller than at any time since 1974. It is 58 percent smaller than when Clinton came to office. It is 47.5 percent smaller than the average deficit during the Reagan-Bush years. Clinton probably was fibbing when he said he favored a seven-year balanced budget plan that involved cutting almost one-third of discretionary domestic spending. However, the fact that he felt compelled to say it indicates that the country’s current intolerance of deficits is more than merely rhetorical. In fact, the federal budget for programs is in surplus. That is, federal revenues exceed outlays for everything the federal government does, excluding only debt service.
If Clinton does undergo a conviction transplant and comes out fighting against the amendment, he may find he has some conservative allies who will reason as follows. The Constitution should not be amended unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Current conditions do not constitute a compelling reason. Neither does the essential nature of democracy. Granted, there has not been a balanced budget since 1969. Still, it is a libel against popular government–a libel refuted by most of American history–to assert that chronic and increasing deficits are inescapable byproducts of popular sovereignty.
Furthermore, one argument conservatives advance for the amendment can be presented by other conservatives as self-refuting. It is the argument that today’s political class is composed of unscrupulous careerists. That class is no longer constrained by the Constitution strictly construed by a sensible judiciary to limit the purview of the federal government. That class is determined to purchase incumbency by bestowing on voters benefits financed by borrowing–that is, by cynically pushing onto the unborn some of the costs of current consumption of government goods and services.
This is not a frivolous argument. But it can be turned by other conservatives against the amendment: If the political class is unscrupulous and cynical, imagine how public life, and the Constitution itself, will be corrupted by budgetary legerdemain concocted to circumvent the amendment. And if today’s judiciary is, by and large, a net subtraction from sensible government, why pass an amendment the construing and enforcing of which will draw the judiciary much deeper into settling political disputes?
Clinton, reelected but still invertebrate, may be irrelevant to the debate about the amendment. Such is the condition of contemporary liberalism, it takes two conservative factions to produce an intellectually interesting argument.
