In dramatic fashion, a battle-weary Senate rejected the balanced budget constitutional amendment by the narrowest of margins today, scuttling the cornerstone of the Republican drive to slash federal spending.
The GOP was dealt its biggest defeat since capturing control of Congress last fall when lawmakers voted for the amendment by 65-35 - two votes short of the two-thirds majority required to change the Constitution.The margin would have been only one vote but for a parliamentary maneuver by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. The Kansas Republican, who backs the proposal, voted against it at the last moment so he would have the right to force lawmakers to vote on the hugely popular measure again in the fall of 1996 - in the heart of the election campaign.
Opponents immediately began seeking political advantage, and included among their targets President Clinton, who waged a quiet campaign against the measure.
"A handful of senators and the president have won this battle, and the people have lost," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a chief sponsor.
As for Democrats, they gleefully invited Republicans to deliver on what the amendment would have demanded but never delivered on its own: a balanced-federal budget. To achieve that, the GOP will have to find $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next seven years, an unprecedented task sure to alienate millions of voters.
"I eagerly await the majority's plans for deficit reduction," said amendment foe Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.
In the end, Democratic leaders couched their fight against the amendment as a battle to protect Social Security and its tens of millions of elderly, heavy-voting recipients from the budget-cutting wars. Republicans vehemently denied that they would chop the program.
Nearly all senators sat silently attheir desks as the roll call was held, the only sound that of the Senate clerk reading the name of each lawmaker and the response of "aye" or "no." Dozens of Senate aides lined the back wall, and the galleries were nearly full.
The long-awaited showdown capped a fierce debate that had ensnared the chamber since Jan. 30. Dole postponed a promised vote on final passage last Tuesday when, a vote shy, amendment supporters desperately sought the decisive vote from a half-dozen wavering Democrats or from the lone GOP holdout, Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon. The most hotly sought Democrats were the two North Dakotans, Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan.
Those Democrats held firm, saying the amendment did not protect Social Security from deficit reduction. Hatfield voted no, also.
Though most amendment supporters were conservative Republicans, they were joined by Democrats, including liberals like Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., a chief sponsor.
In the final tally, 51 Republicans and 14 Democrats voted for the measure and 33 Democrats and two Republicans - including Dole - voted against it.
Before running aground in the Senate, the amendment sailed through the House in January in two days by 300-132.
The amendment would require elimination of the deficit, now running close to $200 billion annually, by 2002. Lawmakers could suspend the requirement by majority vote during wartime, and by a three-fifths margin at any other time.
The measure, however, left for later the hard work of cutting spending or raising taxes to balance the budget.
Passage of the amendment was the top item in House Republicans' campaign manifesto, the "Contract With America," and a leading goal for Senate GOP leaders as well.