A delicate Constitution

I’ve been thinking about Constitutional amendments lately, because it is not yet football season.

The other night, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner traded speeches about the made-up fight over whether to increase the nation’s credit limit. (They’re calling it a debt limit, but it’s a credit limit.) (By the way… we can increase our own credit limit? How different would your life be if you could call Visa and say, “I need to improve my credit score. Spot me another $10,000 in available credit.”)

Any way… Rep. Boehner mentioned a failed GOP bill nicknamed “cut, cap and balance,” which would make the debt ceiling increase contingent on passage of a Constitutional balanced budget amendment. Setting aside the fact that amending the Constitution can take years (with good reason – it’s not something we do impulsively), this isn’t even something that President Reagan tried with any of the 18 times he raised the debt limit. It wasn’t a condition even Boehner himself raised as recently as a few months ago.

Have you ever asked yourself why our country couldn’t just pass a law, or some sort of policy, demanding a balanced budget? Why does it need to be a big ol’ amendment to a Constitution that’s only had 27 of them since 1791 (including 10 at one time, the Bill of Rights), and that hasn’t had one since I was in the sixth grade?

Because requiring a balanced budget is, in the belief of some, un-Constitutional.

As the conservative blog Conservatives on Fire writes, it’s a bad idea on many levels. “In fact, a BBA would be a license to spend at will. So, are our boys and girls in Washington playing games with us or are they that ignorant or worse, are they trying to deceive us?” (Me: do you really need an answer to that question?)

This post is a great summary of one by another conservative blogger, Publius Huldah (which you really should read if you have a chance). Basically, there are so many holes in the BBA that it would basically be a license for the Executive Branch to spend whatever it wants on its own. And since conservatives supposedly oppose the sprawling growth of federal government, and the Executive Branch’s mission creep in particular, it makes no sense for Congressional Republicans to be pushing a BBA.

Now, to the state level… North Carolina is proud to be the only state in the South without a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. So far, our far right General Assembly hasn’t made moves to change that, but it’s a threat given how hard they’ve worked so far to drag our pleasant state back to the dark ages. Again, we have to ask, why an amendment? Same-sex marriage is already not legal in N.C. Why do a bunch of supposedly small-government types want a redundant amendment saying the same thing that a law already does? (Grammar nerds: did you see what I did there? Hee-hee.)

Because an amendment is harder to strip away than a law is.

And this is where I have to call BS on my state’s conservatives. They’re all about laissez-faire, non-interventionist government until it’s an issue where the state’s population is trending away from them. See, five or 10 or 20 years from now when enough North Carolinians say to themselves “This is stupid,” a majority of both houses and a governor’s signature and boom – we join New York, Iowa, et al in granting our tax-paying adult gay citizens the same privileges as their hetero counterparts. Not so with an amendment to the state Constitution.

In other words, pro-amendment conservatives want to restrict the ability of future North Carolinians to pass the laws that reflect our wishes. How’s that for a nanny state?

For me, the moral of the story is this: when someone pushes to amend either the U.S. or a state constitution, we need to ask a lot of questions. Why an amendment, and not a law that can be changed with the times? What are this person’s motives? Is what he or she wants already taken care of by an existing law? Do you get the feeling that he or she just really wants “passed the X Amendment” in his/her obituary? Ask these questions, and demand the answers.

(Since you didn’t ask, but just in case you do… The Equal Rights Amendment. Fair warning: while the ERA technically isn’t dead, the bulk of the movement for it happened before I was born, so I don’t have the perspective of someone who lived through this. It seems to me that the ERA’s provisions are already in the Constitution and existing law. But so were the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, but Congress still needed to pass the Civil Rights Act almost 100 years later to actually start enforcing them. So I’m not going to bash ERA supporters. They lived in a time when marital rape was still perfectly legal, so I can see why a strict constructionist argument didn’t exactly get their sympathy.)