Unconventional Politics: The Campaign for a Balanced-Budget Amendment Constitutional Convention in the 1970s

Abstract

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.