The Joke's on us...

Will Rogers one said that “The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”

Under the din of Herman Cain protestations and Newt Gingrich bellowing, the GOP attempted to put one over on the American people by pushing for yet another balanced budget amendment that would only serve to force massive spending cuts on what little social safety net we have left. Fortunately, the effort sputtered and died in the House of Representatives today, ultimately brought to a timely death by members of the U.S. House of Representatives who argued that Congress can balance the budget without the pressure of a constitutional amendment.

Requiring a two-thirds majority, this latest Republican accident waiting to happen failed 261-165, helped in no small part by Republican legislators who voted with the majority of Democrats in a successful effort to kill the amendment.

Economists had warned that injecting a mandatory balanced budget requirement into the legislative process would likely create the kind of cuts that would equal 17 percent within seven years of the amendment’s passage and ratification. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, cuts of this magnitude would only serve to cripple Social Security by $1.2 trillion and Medicare by $750 billion by 2022.

Today’s vote was held as part of the compromise to raise the nation’s debt limit this past summer—the same deal that produced the deficit-cutting super committee that except for agreeing to reduce Social Security benefits just when our seniors need that income the most, are hopelessly deadlocked.

Since America’s debt will surpass $15 trillion this week, conservatives in the House were certain that now was the time to strike and that a budget balancing amendment was sure to pass. The conservatives should have taken a moment however, and done an old-fashioned head count because even some Republicans opposed it. House Rules Committee Chair David Dreier (R-Calif.) stated that Congress had proved it did not need a change to the United States Constitution to balance the budget because it had already done so many times under President Bill Clinton.

House Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin voted against the amendment because he felt that the language of the legislation was not nearly stringent enough.

The Democrats, who have somewhere along the way gotten some political moxie, made the argument that all the amendment would do is damage the social fabric of the country and provide the courts and the lawyers that inhabit them, the final say over how our tax dollars are to be spent. Don’t want to believe this salient point because you hate Democrats? Here is what that great Republican standard bearer for American jurisprudence, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had to say about balanced budget amendments: “Also troubling is the problem of enforcing such a constitutional provision. In the early stages of discussion, a lot of people, including most economists, apparently thought this was no problem: if Congress exceeded the constitutional limits on spending, someone would sue. That much is true. The result, however, would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.” Bork, of course, is right to be worried about the judiciary’s unfitness to balance the budget. If the Supreme Court strikes down the 2014 budget in 2016, what happens next? Does the government have to take back the money it already spent, and if so, how? And what does this do to America’s credit rating if every bill sent to the federal government is subject to reexamination by nine judges in black robes?
In a statement released right after the amendment failed, House Speaker John Boehner one again demonstrated that he just does not understand basic economics or the lessons learned from history. “It’s unfortunate that Democrats still don’t recognize the urgency of stopping Washington’s job-crushing spending binge.” Mr. Speaker, we did it your way for eight years and look where that got us.

Boehner also took the opportunity to criticize President Obama whose own job bill is floundering in Congress, probably as dead as the amendment to balance the budget. Boehner whined that “It’s disappointing that a President who says ‘we can’t wait’ to take action on jobs is doing that: waiting, riding things out until the election and skipping opportunities to work together with Republicans to create a better environment for job growth.” I can hardly believe the Speaker complaining about the President not being willing to negotiate. All he did these past three years is to attempt to meet the Republicans half-way across the political spectrum. How many times do you keep your hands over the stove before you begin to realize that you are only getting burned?

None of this however will bother the kind of conservatives who now dominate Congress. They were willing to push America to the brink of fiscal implosion during the debt ceiling fight earlier this year. U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), a leading supporter of the balanced budget amendment, even admitted he wants America’s “house to come down” unless we agreed to his extortionist demand to rewrite the Constitution.

So conservative lawmakers have demonstrated time and time again through their actions that they don’t care one bit if their reckless tactics destroy the American economy. They have made absolutely clear however, that they will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the rich, even though doing so is one of the least harmful ways to bring the budget closer to balance.

And that’s the real reason why conservatives in Congress would opposed the balanced budget amendment and it explains why the right-wing Heritage Foundation is already whining that this version of the amendment would not have done anything to save David Koch and Paris Hilton from paying more taxes.