AMENDMENT OPPOSITION RESURFACES : RUBIN ASSAILS PLAN FOR BALANCED BUDGET.

Byline: David E. Sanger The New York Times

A day after President Clinton appeared to open the door a bit to a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin slammed that door shut again Wednesday, declaring that the administration would ``actively oppose'' the adoption of any such amendment.

In an interview, Rubin dismissed a possibility that Clinton held out Tuesday: that the amendment could be written with an escape hatch that ``gives the country what it needs to manage a recession.'' Rubin said any balanced-budget amendment would be ``a dangerous thing to do,'' because ``you can't protect against the unforeseen.''

The Treasury secretary's remarks had apparently been cleared by the White House, which later Wednesday began echoing him.

Clinton's comments Tuesday had been widely read as an acknowledgment of the political reality that a balanced-budget amendment is likely to be approved in 1997 by a more conservative Senate, where the measure failed by only one vote last year.

But Wednesday the president's economic team, apparently fearful that those comments would prompt Democrats who had opposed the amendment to switch their votes, began walking back Clinton's remarks.

Rubin said that after Clinton made his public comments, the president was asked by his chief economic advisers during a meeting at the White House whether he was still opposed to a balanced-budget amendment.

``He said, `Absolutely,' '' Rubin recalled. ``The bottom line is that he is opposed to a balanced-budget amendment, and remains so.''

The chief White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, who on Tuesday told reporters inquiring about the president's position that ``you won't pin me down on this,'' said Wednesday that Rubin's view was also the president's.

``The president and his economic team have not dropped their opposition to a balanced-budget amendment,'' McCurry said. ``There is no difference of view there.''

He said Clinton's earlier remarks were simply an acknowledgment that ``some portions of Congress want to go ahead with this.'' But the president himself, McCurry said, ``doesn't believe they can come up with a way that doesn't threaten the economy.''

Economists who argue against the balanced-budget amendment maintain that it would hamstring Congress or the executive branch in times of economic downturn.

Deficit spending is traditionally a way of spurring a laggard economy. One day last year Rubin and Laura D'Andrea Tyson, chairwoman of the National Economic Council, appeared in the White House press room armed with charts to support their argument that such spending, used at strategic moments, had decreased the volatility of the American economy.

Clinton, though, has long found it politically uncomfortable to argue that he is for balancing the budget but against a constitutional stricture that would require such balance. He stepped around the issue several times during the recent election campaign, and his chief opponent, Bob Dole, never pressed the matter during the two presidential debates.

The president actually has no formal role in the question of a constitutional amendment. He could not veto an amendment passed by Congress; he could only use his bully pulpit to denounce it as bad policy. The reason his aides were upset is that he declined several opportunities Tuesday to do that forcefully.

Responding then to a question after a bill signing, the president talked about a possible constitutional amendment in terms that left it unclear whether he was truly moving away from his own opposition to an amendment, or whether he was just resigned to its eventual passage in a Senate that will be be populated next year by a larger Republican majority than it has had for the past two years.

``My problems with a constitutional amendment were always more a question of how to manage the larger economic problems of the country,'' he said. ``The nation's budget is different from a state, and I just want to make sure that if we have one, it needs to be clear in terms of how - and it needs to really give us the possibility of dealing with a recession.

``You don't want to wind up with a Congress some day in a recession raising taxes or throwing unemployed people off health care because they're trying to get to a balanced budget.''

At another point Clinton said, ``I don't believe we need it.'' But then he talked at length about creating an ``escape hatch'' clause, and added, ``If the escape hatch is good, then we'll manage it the best way we can.''

Rubin insisted Wednesday that there is no such thing as a good escape hatch.