Assembly’s risky hoax
The state Assembly approved a risky hoax Wednesday when it passed a measure calling for a constitutional convention to require Congress to balance the federal budget. We hope the Senate has more respect for voters and rejects this political parlor trick.
Risky because such a convention could open the door to making other changes in the Constitution, threatening rights such as the right to bear arms or the right to free speech or the right to peaceably assemble. Supporters of the measure say it would be limited only to a balanced budget amendment, but there’s no real way to guarantee that.
When the first constitutional convention met in 1787, it was supposed to only tinker with the Articles of Confederation; instead, the new United States ended up with a whole new Constitution. As good as that result was, is it worth the risk to open the door to wholesale change to a document that has served the country so well for so long? No; the better route is the traditional route of Congress approving a single amendment and then moving it to the states for their approval. Don’t open the door to mischief.
But this also is a hoax because any budget amendment won’t achieve its intended goal. Any balanced budget amendment will have to contain exceptions for things such as war and national emergencies. The United States could not have won its independence or World War II without going into debt on a major scale. So there will have to be exceptions, and anyone who thinks those exceptions will be limited to war or an asteroid strike is living in a fantasy world. Your representatives in Congress are creative people, and it’s a pretty safe bet that they’ll be able to create an emergency whenever they think more money is needed for, well, anything.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) was right Thursday when he said, “We are drowning in debt. Congress has failed to act in any meaningful way to curb our growing debt.” But he’s playing voters for suckers by telling them a constitutional convention is the answer.
Try this first: Republicans control Congress and now the White House. They have a real chance to do something meaningful about the debt, and they don’t need an amendment. We doubt they will because in their heart of hearts they like spending every bit as much as Democrats do, even if it’s on different things, such as defense and Trump’s infrastructure plan. Don’t be fooled. This is just a parlor trick.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a better view on this than does Vos: “I certainly would not want a constitutional convention,” he said in 2014. “Whoa! Who knows what would come out of it? … A constitutional convention is a horrible idea.”