Lawmakers rejected legislation Wednesday to compel the United States to maintain a balanced budget, a perennial pursuit of fiscal conservatives that stood little chance of becoming the law of the land.
The House voted 211-207 against the resolution that would have launched an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to bar the federal government from running a deficit. It needed to clear each chamber of Congress by a two-thirds vote, then be ratified by three-fourths of all the states.
But the measure’s consideration had major symbolic meaning for budget hawks like its sponsor, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
“Many of us have been agitating for years to do a balanced budget amendment and out of the blue, they said, ‘we’re ready to do it,’” Biggs said in an interview Tuesday, referring to House GOP leaders.
“They didn’t ask me to do anything, didn’t offer anything,” he said of whether leaders scheduled the vote in an effort to court Biggs, who has in the past threatened to tank spending bills for where he hasn’t liked the price tag. “Just out of the blue, I got a call.”
A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the timing of the measure’s consideration.
Various balanced budget amendment proposals have been offered more than a hundred times since 1999, but peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. The Pew Research Center found that balancing the budget is the single most popular subject of constitutional amendment proposals since 1999, according to analysis of legislative data from the Library of Congress.
Biggs’ latest resolution stated that “total expenditures for a year shall not exceed the average annual receipts collected in the three prior years,” adjusted for inflation and changes in the population.
It would have made an exception for war, where “specific expenditures in excess of the limit” can be approved by Congress “for any year in which a declaration of war is in effect.” Modern wars after World War II have largely been funded by debt; none of them, including the decades-long Global War on Terror, were never backed up by an official declaration of war.
The Biggs measure also would have instituted a two-thirds majority vote threshold in both chambers as necessary to approve any new tax or increase the tax rate. The GOP megabill passed last summer, which included significant tax cuts, passed the Senate in a simple majority vote through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process.
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