Balanced-Budget Amendment Makes Politics Easy, Budgets Bad: View

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution should have two qualities: It should make sense as a piece of legislation, and it should be, as much as possible, politically neutral. The balanced-budget amendment, which has re-emerged in Congress as part of the political jockeying over the budget impasse, fails on both counts.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that a constitution is “made for people of fundamentally differing views.” There are limits to this. You don’t want the Constitution to be neutral between slaveholders and abolitionists. But it shouldn’t be choosing sides in budget disputes. These decisions are up to the elected branches.