Just say no.

First the good news. Earlier this month the Republican leadership in Congress postponed bringing the Balanced-Budget Amendment to a vote in the Senate. The proposed amendment requires that the federal budget be balanced by the year 2002, or two years after the amendment has been ratified by the states, and would make it illegal for the government to spend more than it receives in revenues. It is essentially the same amendment passed by the House in 1995 but defeated by one vote (Mark Hatfield, R-Oreg.) in the Senate. The amendment stipulates that a three-fifths majority in Congress would be required to suspend the balanced-budget requirement.

The Republicans shelved the amendment because they did not have the supermajority (sixty votes in the Senate) needed for its passage. For the time being, the fate of the amendment evidently rests in the untested hands of four newly elected Democratic senators, all of whom have been carefully balancing their own political ledgers by hedging their bets between the proposal's considerable political appeal (polls show voters favor it by large margins) and its almost certain dire consequences and practical unworkability.

Now for the bad news: the amendment effort is far from dead. Balancing the federal budget was, of course, the rallying cry of the 1994 "revolution" that swept the Republicans to majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. Fiscal responsibility remains a resonant issue with the American electorate, whose own state governments are generally required to balance their budgets. (However, states do borrow for capital expenditures such as building roads and schools, something the constitutional amendment would not allow the federal government to do.) Moreover, there is a broad and disturbing political agenda behind the siren call of the Balanced-Budget Amendment. As the neoconservative Gertrude Himmelfarb has written (Commentary, February), "the 'devolution' of relief to the states is not merely a considerable move toward federalism....[but] a considerable step toward the abolition of relief as an entitlement." The rage for balanced budgets, in other words, is really a war on the idea of government's responsibility for the common good, and especially for the needy - a war being waged by fiscal strangulation.

Happily, Bob Dole's outspoken endorsement of the amendment fell largely on deaf ears in the 1996 presidential election. In the aftermath of the first Gingrich Congress, voters learned just how devastating to middle-class entitlements and domestic spending programs balancing the federal budget could be. Republicans, no less than Democrats, were quick to protect powerful special interests and popular federal programs in their home districts. As a consequence, the burden of spending cuts has unjustly fallen on the poor. By some measures, 90 percent of the recent reductions in federal spending has come at the expense of the least well-off. A balanced-budget amendment will mean the federal government's further abandonment of the poor and perhaps the end of federal investment for education, infrastructure, and public health and safety.

How Americans go about financing the necessary tasks of government at all levels is a complicated question with no one right answer. Excessive deficits can spell economic trouble. But deficits are best understood when measured in relation to the size of the whole economy. Currently, the annual federal deficit is a very low 1.5 percent of GDP, and has fallen from $290 billion in 1992 to $107 billion in 1996. Yes, without further cuts in middle-class entitlements larger deficits loom in the near future as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement age (2010). But as the last four years of steady deficit reduction show, economic growth and fiscal discipline can manage the federal debt. With a little political courage and vision, spending for Social Security, Medicare, and the Defense Department can be controlled. Tinkering with the Constitution is entirely unwarranted.

Perhaps most worrisome, the Balanced-Budget Amendment effectively negates majority rule by placing the power of the purse in the hands of a minority: the mere two-fifths in either the House or Senate needed to defeat any future deficit spending. Proponents of the amendment argue that its severe restrictions are a sure check on fiscal irresponsibility. That is doubtful. The states routinely resort to the flimsiest bookkeeping schemes to balance their books, and in Congress both parties have indulged in similar sleight-of-hand. Moreover, increased federal spending for public relief and to spur the economy is essential during times of economic distress or national emergency. (Arguably it is just as essential as a mechanism for more equitably distributing the benefits of prosperity.) Yet the amendment makes the nation's best chance of overcoming economic or political calamity (think of the Great Depression and World War II) hostage to a minority.

And finally, if the amendment is implemented the ambiguities surrounding government accounting practices and even the meaning of words such as "revenues" would inevitably be contested in the courts, thus further judicializing our politics.

The procedures of majority rule are messy and certainly no guarantor of the truth, but historically they have proven a bulwark against fragmentation and tyranny. The Balanced-Budget Amendment threatens to unbalance the arrangement of countervailing powers at the heart of our democracy. It is a radical, not a conservative or a responsible proposal, and Americans should shun it.