Sen. Harry Reid cites natural disasters to argue against balanced-budget amendment

By Karoun Demirjian

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011 | 6:21 p.m.

While Congress was on vacation, the country got walloped with a triple-whammy from Mother Nature: an uncommon earthquake shook the nation’s capital, then a hurricane flooded swaths of the East Coast, and now, wildfires are consuming millions of acres in Texas.

Those catastrophes have become Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s latest rallying cry against House Republicans' spending proposals.

“I don’t see how we, this great nation we have, can stand on the sidelines when our people are suffering,” Reid said to reporters Tuesday. “Some of my Republican colleagues are trying to – um, I was going to say something that was vulgar and I’m not going to do that. Are trying to cater to the Tea Party by holding up relief efforts.”

The complaint stems from Republicans’ push for Congress and the country to adopt a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The amendment would limit the annual budget to the government’s annual tax intake, and also cap spending at 20 percent of GDP – a cap that could be waived by a simple majority vote in Congress in times of war or domestic security. But not necessarily in times of emergencies caused by natural disasters.

One could predict Reid’s reaction after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor clarified things further two weeks ago, saying that the government would find the money to pay for disaster relief only by making cuts elsewhere.

“We've had discussions about these things before, and those monies will be offset with appropriate savings or cost-cutting elsewhere in order to meet the priority of the federal government's role in a situation like this," Cantor said after last month’s Virginia-epicentered 5.9 earthquake.

That bottom line, to provide for emergencies through offsets, didn’t sit so well with Reid.

“We have thousands of troops in Iraq. Tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan. None of that is paid for. All these tax cuts that have been initiated are now in effect, not paid for. Does that mean Americans who are suffering, we’re going to say: 'well we can’t do this, we have to pay for this?'” Reid said.

Reid pledged to move a $6 billion measure to augment funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency – unpaid for – to cover immediate and continued disaster relief.

Both houses of Congress will also vote on a balanced budget amendment this fall, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling. To be adopted as a Constitutional amendment, it must secure two-thirds of the votes in both the Senate and the House, and be ratified by three-quarters of the states – or 38 states.