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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 1, 1995                   TAG: 9502010055
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

U.S. SENATE BUDGETS & FILIBUSTERS

THE PROPOSED balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution continues to strike us as itself a thing out of balance, a bit like using a baseball bat to swat a mosquito. The amendment races along nonetheless, and was sent last week to the Senate by a 300-132 vote in the House of Representatives.

Fortunately, the potential for mischief was lessened somewhat with failure of a Republican effort to include a provision requiring a three-fifths majority vote for any tax increase. Part of the Republicans' "Contract with America," that version fell 37 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary for a constitutional amendment.

Opponents of the provision argued - correctly in our view - that the three-fifths requirement for a tax increase would unduly thwart the will of the majority. On tax legislation, it would have automatically given 41 percent of the House a stranglehold over the other 59 percent. It would resemble the way in which filibusters can give, on many kinds of legislation, 41 percent of the Senate a stranglehold over the other 59 percent .

All the more ironic, then, that a Senate filibuster by the amendment's skeptics is a distinct possibility. On Friday, 41 Democrats signed a letter to Majority Leader Robert Dole asking the Republicans, before approving the amendment for submission to the states, to show how they would actually balance the budget. "The number is significant," observed The Christian Science Monitor, "because that is the minimum needed to preserve a filibuster."

The Democrats' request raises a good point: The American people need to understand that the federal budget won't be balanced solely, or even very much, by a bit of waste-trimming here and some welfare-cutting there.

But the idea of filibustering the amendment to death is appalling. Since it takes only 34 votes in the Senate to defeat a constitutional amendment directly, death by filibuster would be do little but provide a means for the fainthearted to sidestep a vote on the amendment itself. It would be one more example of the sort of congressional arrogance of which the public has grown heartily sick.

by CNB