Meese: Balanced Budget Amendment Will Backfire Unless It Curbs Spending, Taxes, Courts

(CNSNews.com) – Edwin Meese, who served as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, told CNSNews.com on Friday that adding a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution will backfire unless the amendment caps federal spending, requires supermajorities in Congress to raise taxes and restricts the ability of judges to preempt the elected branches in determining federal taxing and spending laws.

“A weak Balanced Budget Amendment–without certain safeguards and protections against excessive taxation and excessive spending–would be worse than the situation we have at the present time,” Meese said in a videotaped interview at the Heritage Foundation.

“It would be used by those who seek to have an expanded government and increased taxes to make it mandatory to increase taxes,” said Meese. “It would make it much easier to raise taxes, and that’s why the important thing is to have a protection, for example, that it would take two-thirds of both houses in order to increase taxes … and, likewise, that there be some sort of a cap on expenditures, perhaps in relation to Gross Domestic Product.

“It’s also very important,” said Meese, “that the balanced budget amendment provide that the courts would not be empowered to enforce the provisions of the balanced budget amendment because that would turn over to the courts the ability for them to raise taxes perhaps or to exercise powers that the Constitution gives to the elected branches of the government, and that is adopting the spending plan for the federal government.”

The legislation to increase the federal debt limit that House Speaker John Boehner negotiated with President Barack Obama in August directs that both houses of Congress will vote on a balanced budget amendment before the end of this year. But the law does not specify what type of balanced budget amendment the House and Senate will take up for a vote.

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 Read More at CNS News By Matt Cover, CNS News