Unconventional Politics: The Campaign for a Balanced-Budget Amendment

Constitutional Convention in the 1970s
Authors: MORGAN IWAN 
Published: July 2002

The drive to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced
federal
budgets has been a defining issue of American politics in the final decade

of the twentieth century. Supporters of this measure deemed it the only

way to break the cycle of huge deficits that inflated the national debt
to
almost unmanageable proportions in recent years. In 1995, 1996 and 1997

only the Senate's narrow failure to deliver the requisite two-thirds

majority – latterly by a single vote – prevented Congress proposing
an
amendment for ratification by the states. Nevertheless the balanced-budget

amendment campaign is not a product of the deficit-conscious
1990s. It originated in the 1970s as a movement by the states to impose

fiscal discipline on the federal government. Between 1975 and 1979 thirty

states petitioned Congress for a convention to write a balanced-budget

amendment. The convention method of constitutional reform had lain
unused since the Founding Fathers devised it as an alternative to
congressional initiative, but the support of only four more states would

have provided the two-thirds majority needed for its implementation. The

states' campaign stalled at this juncture in the face of opposition
from the
Carter administration and congressional Democrats. By then, however, it

had done much to popularize the balanced-budget amendment and make
it part of the nation's political agenda.

This article seeks to analyze the development of the balanced-budget

amendment constitutional convention campaign and to assess its historical

significance. Aside from its relevance to today's fiscal politics,
the
movement merits attention as an important episode in the history of the

1970s, an era when economic problems at home and defeat abroad
underlined the limits of America's prosperity and power. In this troubled

time, popular confidence in the nation's political leaders underwent

marked decline. The Watergate scandal, failure in Vietnam and economic

stagflation created doubts about their trustworthiness and competence to

deal with America's problems. The budget revolt by the states was
a
manifestation of this anti-Washington mood. In style as well as substance,

the campaign challenged conventional politics: it manifested distrust in

elected leaders to manage public finances without constitutional restraint

and sought to bypass establishment control of the orthodox forms of
politics through adoption of an untested process of constitutional change.

In many respects the drive for a balanced-budget amendment convention
was an expression of the same populist impulse that was the mainspring

of Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976. The former Georgia

governor's status as a political outsider untainted by previous connection

with Washington had been his greatest electoral asset, but in office this

man-of-the-people aligned himself with the nation's political establishment

against the convention campaign. Analysis of Carter's response
to this movement casts light on the ambiguity and complexity of his
presidential politics.