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Once again, it appears the fate of the Republican-sponsored balanced budget amendment turned on one vote. After today's defeat in the House, Jim Lehrer talks with Congress watcher Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

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JIM LEHRER: The fate of the balanced budget amendment is first tonight. Kwame Holman begins our coverage.

KWAME HOLMAN: Two years ago the fate of the balanced budget amendment turned on the vote of one Senator, Republican Mark Hatfield of Oregon.

SPOKESMAN: Mr. Hatfield--Mr. Hatfield, no.

KWAME HOLMAN: The balanced budget amendment fell one vote short of the necessary two thirds of the Senate needed to pass a constitutional amendment. Then Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole didn't blame Mark Hatfield but couldn't hide his disappointment and frustration.

SEN. BOB DOLE, Senate Majority Leader: (1995) So I'm still very upbeat about having a balanced budget amendment passed by the Congress, not withstanding the effort made by the White House, and particularly by President Clinton, who doesn't believe in balanced budgets, doesn't believe in dealing with the budget--

KWAME HOLMAN: Both Dole and Hatfield since have left the Senate, and today the chamber is filled with new faces. Of the 15 freshmen, 11 are Republicans, including Oregon's Gordon Smith, who succeeded Hatfield and who supports the balanced budget amendment. But despite the new faces and a one-set pick-up by the Republican majority, it appears the fate of the Republican-sponsored balanced budget amendment once again has turned on one vote.

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU, (D) Louisiana: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for being patient.

KWAME HOLMAN: Yesterday, previously undeclared Democrat Mary Landrieu, a freshman from Louisiana, announced she would vote for the balanced budget amendment, reluctantly.

SEN. MARY LANDRIEU: Based on statements that I made in the campaign about a commitment to an amendment I believe that this is the right thing to do at this time.

KWAME HOLMAN: Landrieu thus became the 11th Democrat to announce support for the balanced budget amendment, but even with all 55 Republican Senators pledging their support, the amendment still was one vote short of the 67 needed for passage.

SPOKESMAN: Senator from New Jersey.

KWAME HOLMAN: Until this afternoon the only remaining undeclared vote in the Senate belonged to another freshman Democrat, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey. Two years ago, as a member of the House, Torricelli voted for the balanced budget amendment, but since then, Torricelli points out, the federal budget deficit has decreased.

SEN. ROBERT TORRICELLI, (D) New Jersey: The question, therefore, is whether the United States has learned a valuable lesson from the excesses that began in 1981 and began to abate in 1993, or whether, indeed, this change of fortunes in the last four years is in itself an aberration and a permanent amendment to the Constitution is required.

KWAME HOLMAN: Torricelli came to the Senate floor this morning not to announce his decision on the balanced budget amendment but to try to make it more to his liking.

SEN. ROBERT TORRICELLI: The amendment that I bring before the body today deals with three central elements of the resolution. First, whether or not the United States government should continue to both have its current accounts and its capital budget reflected in a single accounting; second, how, indeed, under this amendment the government will respond to times of economic recession; and third, how the United States government would respond to threats to our national security under the provisions of the resolution.

KWAME HOLMAN: Knowing the importance of Torricelli's vote, Republican Orrin Hatch, the chief sponsor of the amendment, nonetheless, opposed Torricelli's proposed changes.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH, Chairman, Judiciary Committee: The amendment, I'm sorry to say, would create a huge loophole, a giant loophole that would swallow the balanced budget rule.

KWAME HOLMAN: Moments later Senators voted on and soundly defeated the Torricelli amendment. The New Jersey Senator immediately went before reporters to announce he would not support the unaltered version of the balanced budget amendment.

SEN. ROBERT TORRICELLI: All doubts concerning amendments to the Constitution of the United States must be settled in favor of leaving the genius of the founding fathers undisturbed. Those doubts compel me to deny the 67th and deciding vote for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget in the United States Senate.

KWAME HOLMAN: Still, amendment sponsor Orrin Hatch said he was not ready to give up.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: This battle always reminds me of a toothache I once had. It's a tough battle; it's not over yet. I'm disappointed, terribly disappointed. And I said it would be one of the great disappointments of my life. I think that's a little bit of an understatement. I'm very disappointed. On the other hand, I'm not going to judge my colleague. He has to make whatever decisions he makes. I just know if it was me and I said I would vote for the balanced budget amendment, I would have voted for it. It's that simple.

KWAME HOLMAN: If no Senator changes position, the amendment will fail when a final Senate vote is taken next Tuesday and probably will not reach a vote in the House during this Congress.

JIM LEHRER: Now, more on this story from Congress watcher Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. Norm, is it over yet?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN, American Enterprise Institute: It's over for this year almost certainly, and the Senate Republicans have basically said that if they lose when the final vote takes place--and now they're pretty confident they will lose--that that will do it for now. But, let's face it, this issue came up two years ago in the last Congress. It is going to come up in the next Congress. It may be debated and voted upon in the House of Representatives now, although that would not be for more than show at this stage because--

JIM LEHRER: Because it takes both Houses, doesn't it?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: It takes both Houses to get it out to the states and then 3/4 of the states would have to ratify it. A constitutional amendment is very different from the regular piece of legislation. The issue will be back, but the high hopes that Republicans had--you know, Kwame noted that two years ago it was the one Republican hold-out who made the difference by one vote in the Senate.

JIM LEHRER: Mark Hatfield.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Mark Hatfield. This time, not only was Hatfield gone, but a slew of opponents of the amendments left. Republicans had more seats, and they had a number of Democrats coming in who voted for a version of the constitutional amendment in the House, or who indicated support for it, and they couldn't hold them.

JIM LEHRER: Why? What happened?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, I think several things happened here, Jim. One is that, as Bob Torricelli suggested, the political and policy climate changed. Two years ago, remember, we had the new Republican House of Representatives heading towards a confrontation with the President of immense proportions on the budget with no clue that there would be any resolution and the strong confidence that they would prevail and basically define it as they were for a balanced budget, the Democrats weren't, and it would have enormous political resonance.

Now, after, of course, that effort collapsed with the shutdown of the government, there simply is no political momentum on their side, and, of course, deficits have come down, and there is not a sense of urgency out in the country. We also had an intervening election where not one person who voted against the constitutional amendment to balance the budget lost his or her seat as a consequence. So the implied threat--if you don't support this, then you're going to be toast at the polls--just didn't hold.

JIM LEHRER: And so in Torricelli's case specifically, we just saw Sen. Hatch take the hit that well, implying--not implying, suggesting that Torricelli had said during the campaign for the Senate he would vote for this and then didn't. Torricelli doesn't think that's going to be a problem for him six years from now when he runs for re-election.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: And he's got six years, of course, which also makes a difference in the Senate. But that's certainly a part of what was in Torricelli's calculations. By the way, Mary Landrieu, the Senator from Louisiana, had a slightly different political calculation because the Senate Republicans are investigating now, the Senate is investigating now allegations of irregularities in the election in Louisiana that brought her here, and certainly the question of whether or not Republicans would be enraged had she voted against them on this score was lurking in the background there.

For Torricelli, for Tim Johnson of South Dakota, another Democrat who voted for an amendment in the House and then voted against it this time, the political calculations, I think, had changed. There's one other factor here we have to remember. When you get actually close to passing a constitutional amendment, you move beyond the symbolism of talking about it to actually having something that is almost irrevocable, unlike a law, go out there. The focus on what it would actually do and whether or not it would have unintended consequences becomes more intense. And the debate this time was, in fact, much more focused on what the amendment would do than the debate two years ago.

JIM LEHRER: For instance, give me--where did it focus this time--what did it focus on this time that it didn't do two years ago?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: We had a very interesting colloquy the other day, a discussion back and forth, not just set speeches, but really discussion between Robert Bird of West Virginia, one of the prominent opponents of the amendment, and Orrin Hatch, who's been the chief sponsor, all talking about whether this would and could balance a budget, what would happen if we had a dispute over what outlays meant, over what the spending, the revenues were, would the courts intervene, when could the courts intervene, what would happen if we hit a recession but didn't know it; what would happen if a war loomed but we weren't actually in a declared war, and you need a super majority in some of these cases to override the amendment, and, in effect, one of the issues that Torricelli raised, the so-called "capital budget," in states that have constitutional provisions to balance the budget, of course, any of us who have municipal bonds from states know that they borrow. They don't exactly balance.

JIM LEHRER: They don't balance the budget. They borrow the money and issue more bonds.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: They balance what's called an operating budget. Long-term capital expenditures for roads, for example, you can borrow money for those, just as the rest of us can take a mortgage out on a house. And the question of why there is no separate capital budget came into play here as well.

JIM LEHRER: Because the federal budget doesn't work that way. It's all under the one budget.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: It's all under the one budget. In effect, what this objection by Torricelli and others suggested was that if states had the same provision as this federal constitutional amendment, they couldn't operate, so shouldn't we do it the same way as the others? That kind of level of detail in a way, and of course the Social Security issue, which we haven't mentioned, which was a prominent thing two years ago--

JIM LEHRER: And the Democrats brought that up this time and made a lot of hay on that, didn't they? They wanted--well, explain what they wanted.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Even more than two years ago, when it was raised as an issue, Social Security now runs a surplus, but that surplus is offset against, as part of the overall budget--it's not a separate program in the budget--a larger deficit in the rest of the budget. And, in effect, what many Democrats were saying is you're masking the budget deficit. And if you balance the budget and you don't protect Social Security, we will do even more violence to it. So let's take it out. Republicans said that's unrealistic. Once you start there, where will you end up, but it gave more cover for people to vote against it. But while this was the top public issue in terms of the debate this time, you really did get a more serious discussion because we were coming so close. And chances are, if you have even more votes that could take you over the top in both Houses of Congress, two years from now we'll have an even sharper focus.

JIM LEHRER: But doesn't it also have to become a public issue again, bigger than it is now?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: We saw Orrin Hatch, you know, say how disappointed he was. He wasn't yelling and screaming. He didn't seem as bitterly disappointed as Bob Dole did two years ago, and I think he is definitely disappointed, but part of the reason is his feeling that every Republican this time voted for the constitutional amendment to balance the budget. A sharp majority of Democrats will vote against, and so he hopes that this will become enough of a partisan issue that it'll be a club to use the next time around.

JIM LEHRER: And that's probably two years from now.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: In the Senate at least, and certainly in the public debate. We will see it arise in the campaign if there's some fiscal crisis that may come up again, but two years from now you can be sure we'll be back discussing this.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you, Norm.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Jim.

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