Clinton Expands Effort Behind Scenes to Kill Balanced-Budget Amendment

WASHINGTON —  Wading into the year’s first major legislative battle, President Clinton has escalated his behind-the-scenes efforts to defeat a balanced-budget amendment--a move that Republicans warned could undermine the mutually professed desire for bipartisanship on an array of issues.

In recent private conversations, Clinton has told congressional Democrats that he opposes the GOP initiative because it would use the annual surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund to help balance the nation’s books, according to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

Clinton has long opposed the proposed amendment, but how aggressively he would fight it this year had been in doubt. In a meeting with congressional leaders days after November’s election, the president hinted that his opposition had limits.

“I don’t believe we need it, but if we have it, it ought to be implemented in a way that actually works and gives the country what it needs to manage a recession,” the president said.

But in mid-January, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin lambasted the amendment, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that its restrictions could not only aggravate recessions but also increase the risk of default on the national debt.

Clinton since has said he wants to derail the amendment in Congress.

Including Social Security, the federal deficit this year is projected to be about $100 billion; without it, the deficit would be more like $160 billion, making a balanced budget that much harder to achieve.

The trust fund is projected to run surpluses for about 15 more years, then go into deficit when retiring members of the baby-boom generation generate huge demands for benefits.

It was this issue two years ago that caused the constitutional amendment to fall one vote shy of the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to send it to the states for possible ratification. The measure had cleared the House.

Several Democratic senators--while insisting that they, too, wanted to pass a balanced-budget amendment--refused to vote for it without a provision that barred the government from using the surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund in calculating whether revenues are in line with expenditures.

They argued then--and continue to do so--that the absence of a Social Security protection clause would allow lawmakers to raid the fund to balance the budget.

To highlight that point, six Democratic senators, including Dianne Feinstein of California, plan to introduce a balanced-budget amendment today that excludes the trust fund from the equation.

Republicans dismissed the Democrats’ position as a smoke screen to conceal their uninterest in balancing the budget.

Excluding Social Security, the Republicans argued, might allow officials to duck responsibility for keeping that program solvent.

“This is now the major issue in our country,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, declared Monday.

But Daschle, calling the balanced-budget amendment “a disaster,” said: “The president is as concerned as we are about the Social Security implications of the balanced-budget amendment. . . . To use that trust fund and to enshrine it in the Constitution is wrong. The president shares our view that it’s wrong and will make it unequivocally clear.”

Daschle also told reporters that Clinton this week “will be releasing a letter to our colleagues” on the matter.

At the White House, Press Secretary Mike McCurry said the president has not yet dispatched such a letter to the Hill, but he added: “I think the president can be expected to articulate his views publicly, and, most likely in writing, in a variety of [forums] as the debate on the amendment proceeds.”

Clinton’s tactics drew immediate fire from Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

“I think you shouldn’t begin by saying what you’re not going to do,” Lott said. “If we really get shrill on any early issue, or if we really resort to demagoguery on a particular part of the budget or on some issue, that’s not constructive in terms of being able to work together on a lot of other issues or the next issue.”

Lott’s remarks reflect the festering GOP resentment over the hard-hitting political campaign that Democrats waged in 1996, when they accused Republicans of trying to cut benefits to those 65 and over.

Many Democrats object to the balanced-budget amendment under any circumstances, arguing that it might prevent Congress from deficit spending in an economic recession or confer upon judges the authority, in effect, to make fiscal policy.

Amendment backers counter by arguing that the measure still would allow a waiver by a three-fifths majority vote in both houses and that the courts always have been allowed to interpret acts of Congress.

After approval by two-thirds of each house, an amendment must be approved by the legislatures of 38 of the 50 states.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.