
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 18, 1995                   TAG: 9501200059
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TRIVIALIZING THE CONSTITUTION

NO FEWER than four proposed constitutional amendments are under serious consideration by the recently Republicanized Congress. Even at the end of the Civil War, with the need urgent to redefine many kinds of relationships within the nation, only three amendments were deemed necessary - and they weren't sent to the states all in the same year.

Indeed, in all the Constitution's 206 years, only 27 amendments have been added to it. The first 10 - the package called the Bill of Rights - are a special case, almost as old as the Constitution and enacted as a condition for some states' ratification of the original document. If you also discount the 18th (Prohibition) and the 21st (repeal of same) as canceling each other out, the Constitution has been amended only 15 times.

Sober-minded folk, the kind who used to be called "conservative," might spot a warning flag in all this. Do the currently proposed amendments, quite apart from the wisdom or folly of their aims, even pass the threshold test of making sense procedurally?

Two do.

Whatever you think of term limits, the issue is legitimately constitutional. Though a Supreme Court ruling pends, the Constitution clearly seems to bar states from setting extraconstitutional qualifications for Congress. Similarly, the Constitution appears to bar Congress from imposing term limits on itself.

If congressional term limits are a good place to go, in other words, a constitutional amendment is the way to get there.

The Constitution also appears to prohibit what some people seem to have in mind when calling for "voluntary prayer" in the public schools. The calls entail at least some sponsorship by the state of religious practice.

Thus, the issue of school prayer is also legitimately constitutional. If government is to be granted a power currently denied it by the Constitution, it must be done by amending that Constitution.

The ballyhooed balanced-budget amendment, by contrast, would not clarify, amplify, reverse or otherwise alter anything about the Constitution. Absolutely nothing in the Constitution, nor in any court interpretation of the Constitution, constrains Congress from passing a balanced budget.

Rather than constitutional, the constraints are political and economic. Beware any Congress that wants to pass a balanced-budget amendment but not a balanced budget. (Meanwhile, America's armies of lawyers might begin preparing for entry into a vast new field of prospective litigation, if budget-making becomes not only a parliamentary wrangle but also a constitutional one.)

The same criticism applies to the proposed amendment banning "unfunded mandates." If Congress opposes the imposition of unfunded mandates on the states, it can always simply not impose them. The Constitution doesn't mind.

Two of the four amendments seriously proposed in the Republicans' "Contract with America" would change nothing now in the Constitution. Meanwhile, President Clinton talks of a "Bill of Rights" for the middle class, as if a tax cut were a fundamental right on a par with free speech or trial by jury. The intent of such proposals may be to elevate the importance of particular points of policy detail, but the effect is to devalue the quality of constitutional thinking and the dignity of the Constitution.

by CNB