Coalition Efforts Beat Back BBA

Special credit should go to AFSCME, which led both the legislative and public relations campaigns while serving as a hub for coalition members.

Torricelli's announcement ended several days of suspense for both supporters and opponents of the BBA. A few days earlier, freshman Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) announced that she would vote for the amendment, leaving the Republican leadership just one vote shy of the 67 they needed for passage. Torricelli was subsequently thrown into the spotlight as the deciding vote. According to press accounts, Torricelli's office received 1,000 postcards and hundreds of phone calls a day at a rate of 21 to one urging him to oppose the amendment! The Senator even had to have another phone line installed so he could reach his staffers when he was away from the office.

Torricelli made his announcement less than an hour after the defeat of his amendment to the Republican-supported version of the BBA (S.J. Res. 1). His amendment would have allowed the government to run a deficit with a majority vote in times of military crisis and economic recession (S.J. Res. 1 required a two-thirds majority to run a deficit anytime). It also would have created a capital budget, exempt from balanced budget requirements. A number of amendments to S.J. Res. 1 and substitute BBAs were introduced and defeated during the final days of debate. Sen. Byron Dorgan (R-ND) offered a substitute amendment which would have exempted the Social Security trust fund from balanced budget requirements. It was killed 59-41 shortly after Torricelli's announcement.

Once the BBA was defeated in the Senate, the House ended its push. But it would have been uphill for the Republican leadership anyway, as they would have had to rope in an additional 8-10 Democratic freshmen. Also complicating matters was emerging division in the Republican ranks; two groups of conservative Republicans broke off and threatened to vote against the main amendment (S.J. Res. 1) if their changes were not included. One group, headed by Reps. Joe Barton (R-TX) and John Shadegg (R-AZ), proposed an alternative amendment that would have required a two-thirds vote of Congress to raise taxes. Barton said at the time that he and other conservatives were "leaning" toward voting against the primary amendment. Another group, led by Reps. Mark Neumann (R-WI) and Mark Souder (R-IN), supported a version of the amendment that excluded the Social Security trust funds from balanced budget requirements.

In the Senate, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) deserve credit for persuading undecided Democrats to vote against the BBA, arguing that passage of the amendment would place the country in an economic straightjacket and bring about a slew of unintended consequences.

A budget forecast conducted by the Congressional Budget Office in January captured some of these arguments. The report found that because the start of the federal fiscal year in 2000 (Oct. 1) falls on a Sunday, the federal government would need to make payments for a variety of services and programs — such as salaries to military personnel, payments to veterans, Supplemental Security Income recipients, and Medicare health maintenance organizations — on the previous Friday. This would result in 13 benefit payments in FY 2000 and only 11 in FY 2001, giving the impression of a rising deficit in FY 2000. Under the BBA, this quirk in the calendar would require the government to make cuts in an amount equal to the extra payments in FY 2000.