Lance's Debt Amendment: A 27 in 10,000 Shot

Two weeks ago, U.S. Rep. Leonard Lance (R-Hunterdon County), a first-term incumbent seeking reelection in November, proposed a Constitutional amendment that would limit the federal debt. The United States currently owes about $13.4 trillion, according to the U.S. Debt Clock, an online site that tracks federal and state budgetary figures.

"The debt is 94 percent of the GDP, which is as high as it's been since World War II," Lance said in an interview last week. "Ten years ago it was at 57 percent, twenty years ago it was at 55 percent and thirty years ago it was 32 percent, and today it's 94 percent."

Lance said his amendment, which is still being drafted, would seek to limit the debt by tying it to a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. He added that the amendment would probably include a provision that would allow Congress to override the limit by supermajority vote in the event of war or national emergency.

Lance said he planned to introduce the amendment next year. But how difficult would it be to pass? A successful amendment takes a supermajority: two-thirds approval in Congress, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states. Some proposed amendments include a time limit for ratification by the states.

"The process is designed to be very difficult," David P. Redlawsk, a professor of political science at Rutgers University and the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, said in a telephone interview. "There have been more than 10,000 proposed amendments in the history of the United States, and only 27 have been passed. The first 10 were passed immediately and so really only 17 out of those have succeeded the process."

When asked about the likelihood of Lance's proposal succeeding, Redlawsk said he doubted that Congress would willingly tie its own hands with regard to budgets and spending by approving a debt-limiting amendment. He also noted that the amendment would increase the difficulty of addressing inflation, which relies on controversial and opposing metrics.

Lance, himself, acknowledged that "there is no chance at all that this Congress would pass an amendment [to limit deficit spending]. I have little confidence, or no confidence that over the course of the remaining session progress will be made. I am looking to the future of the new Congress in January."

Professor Daniel Dreisbach of the American University School of Public Affairs noted in a telephone interview that "there are plenty of examples in history of an amendment being proposed for reasons other than to be passed. Anyone who initiates an amendment knows it's an extremely difficult process. A lot of amendments are proposed to bring attention to an issue. But that doesn't mean the amendment itself is a lost cause."

While passing an amendment is an intricate and thorny process, final success may be a slow and eventual reward. "We have to remember that the most recently ratified amendment was first proposed by James Madison," Dreisbach says.

That amendment, the 27th, passed in 1992 and stipulates that laws regarding Congressional salaries cannot take effect until the beginning of the next Congress. It took more than two centuries to pass.