GETTING ALL UNBALANCED

By Richard Lacayo

Who says decorum is gone from Capitol Hill? After a week of Senate deliberations that might have been mistaken for a schoolyard rumble as they prepared to vote on their balanced-budget amendment, the members arranged themselves into something like a class picture. All were seated decorously at their antique mahogany desks. As the clerk called their names, each rose separately to announce his or her vote. Republican Hank Brown of Colorado even put his hand over his heart as he said, "Aye." You could almost forget that most of them still had slingshots in their back pockets.

Or you could wait until the voting was over and the potshots resumed. More than a month of debate and horse trading, cajoling and drafting budget charts on the backs of envelopes resulted in the hairbreadth defeat of the balanced-budget amendment, a centerpiece of the "Contract with America." It was the first reality check for Republicans since they barreled into Washington in January. Certainly it will complicate the job of congressional G.O.P. leaders, who are still promising to make the $1.2 trillion in cuts necessary to balance the budget by the year 2002, the deadline in the amendment. The loss was also the first real sign that major provisions of a contract born in the House, where the budget amendment breezed through in two days, could meet death at an early age in the Senate. And for once Democratic leaders who had been struggling to resist the Republicans were able to frame an issue their way, even if they had to resort to the oldest liberal scare tactic. Against the irresistible force of budget-balancing sentiment they placed the immovable object of Social Security's sanctity.

Beating the Republicans still meant opposing a popular notion, though nobody on the Democratic side is saying out loud the words Pyrrhic victory. "It's a big victory," figures one senior White House official. "We'll pay for it later, of course." Or sooner-one day after the vote, G.O.P. radio ads were running in the states of six Democrats who supported the amendment when it came to a vote two years ago but changed sides this time. Since none of the six face re-election next year, they can brush off the attacks for now. But one Senate Democrat is lost already. A day after the vote, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, who had supported the amendment, switched over to the Republicans. Though his reasons include a long-time feud with Democrats in his state, he cited the amendment defeat as one of them.

By helping frame their opposition as a defense of Social Security, minority leader Tom Daschle gave fellow Democrats some cover against Republican attack ads, but it's a tricky position. In polls taken before the vote, public support for the amendment went as high as 80%. When the same people were asked how they would have felt about the amendment had Social Security been affected, the numbers dropped by half or more. All that Democrats have to do now is convince voters that their opposition to the amendment doesn't mean they are content with continued big-government spending-not the kind of distinction that fits on a bumper sticker.

For all that, right now it's a Republican mess, one they had good reason to expect would not land in their laps. Less than a week before the vote, the amendment looked like a sure thing. The first sign of real trouble came when Democrats Sam Nunn of Georgia and John Breaux of Louisiana, both likely supporters, moved to the opposing side. In the event of disputes about its meaning, they said, the amendment could allow judges to decide budget and tax questions that are ordinarily within the exclusive power of Congress. To win them back, the G.O.P. leadership revised the text to prohibit courts from enforcing it, an act of expediency that also made the amendment a paper tiger. In the absence of judicial oversight, Congress would have to compel itself to balance the budget-the very thing it has been unable to do.

Even then, North Dakota's Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan balked. Though both Democrats had been counted as possible "yes" votes, by early last week it was plain they would insist on ruling out using the Social Security trust fund to balance the budget. For Republicans that was a showstopper. By counting its multibillion-dollar surpluses as government income, both parties have used the trust fund for years to finesse their deficit calculations. Without it, Congress would have to find an additional $500 billion in cuts over seven years to balance the budget.

On Tuesday night, with the vote scheduled to take place, Bob Dole suddenly announced a suspension. In no time, Conrad found himself surrounded by more than a dozen Republican Senators, who ushered him into their cloakroom. Twenty minutes later he emerged, only to be set upon again, this time by Daschle, who hurried him into the Democrats' cloakroom. When he escaped from there, it was Phil Gramm's turn to corner Conrad with budget diagrams sketched on the back cover of the Congressional Record.

What the Republicans were offering was a promise to remove the Social Security trust fund from their budget calculations by a specific date, perhaps the year 2008. When they thought they had a deal on that point, Conrad suddenly came back with an additional demand: that the sponsors add language that would permit Congress to suspend the amendment by a simple majority vote in times of economic hardship. The negotiations were over.

Soon after, Dole stunned the packed Senate chamber by breaking protocol and adjourning for the night. That led to a moment of high dudgeon from West Virginia's Robert Byrd, who took the floor to denounce "a sleazy, tawdry effort" to buy time in which to put more pressure on Conrad. "This is a sad spectacle-we're tampering with the Constitution of the U.S.," Byrd declaimed. "This is no place for deal making, for backroom huddles."

Especially when they don't work. Two days later, the amendment went down to defeat, 65 to 35. Fourteen of the Senate's 47 Democrats were on the "yes" side. Only two of the 53 G.O.P. Senators broke ranks. (See page 31 for your Senators' votes.) One was Mark Hatfield of Oregon, at age 72 the last surviving specimen of liberal Republicanism, who maintained that the amendment would trivialize the Constitution. The other was Dole, who switched his yes to no in a parliamentary maneuver that will allow him to call the amendment back up for a vote at any time-for instance, during the presidential campaign next year.

Though Dole used every means at his disposal to squeeze out the last vote, his defeat in his first major test as a majority leader in the current Congress is not exactly a plus for his presidential ambitions. He thus tried to cast the loss as a problem for the other side. "I wasn't elected Democratic leader," he said defensively, and for good measure added that "there would have been an amendment if there had been a real President" in the White House. Party hard-liners still grumbled that Dole could have done more to force the hand of his fellow Republican Hatfield.

Throughout the week's drama, the man Dole wants to replace kept a low profile. Though Clinton and his advisers have long regarded the amendment as a potentially dangerous gimmick that would make it harder for government to use its spending power to soften recessions, the President tried to distinguish his opposition to the amendment from his support for "the impulses that are giving rise to it." He also pursued a low-key campaign of quiet calls to wavering Democrats, offering them a chance to sit down with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Budget Director Alice Rivlin to work through the numbers. Says one White House adviser: "The last thing Senator Conrad wanted was the President's calling him up and pressuring him."

The budget amendment offered the myth of a nearly automatic return to fiscal discipline. Without it, politicians will have to cut line by line. In the House, Republicans on the Appropriations committee last week sent to the floor a record $17.3 billion in cuts from this year's $1.5 trillion budget. It meant reductions in job training, housing, education and public broadcasting. Last week House Speaker Newt Gingrich sent Clinton a letter urging him to submit within a month a plan outlining the cuts he would make to balance the budget in seven years. That would have the President putting his numbers out several weeks before House Republicans. After you, said Clinton. At his news conference last week, he urged Congress "to write a disciplined budget that brings the deficit down."

Over in the House, Budget committee chairman John Kasich, who has been saying for months that a defeat of the amendment would make serious cuts all but impossible, was putting the best face on things. "I would have liked to have the legal club over everybody's head," he told TIME. "It now gets down to a matter of human will." As it happens, that's been the problem from the start.

--Reported by James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington

With reporting by James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington