The United States has passed $39 trillion in national debt. Interest payments will exceed $1 trillion this fiscal year — the first time debt service has topped ten figures in American history. That exceeds the entire defense budget. It exceeds Medicaid. And the debt accumulates at roughly $8 billion a day.
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There is a constitutional amendment that would fix this. It has been introduced in some form in every Congress for four decades. Virtually every Republican in the House and Senate supports it. The constitutions of 49 states already require something equivalent. Polling consistently shows supermajority public support. It came within a single Senate vote of passing in 1995 and 1997 — one vote each time, in a body of 100.
It will never pass Congress. That’s a realistic analysis of the structural problem, which is that the institution being asked to constrain itself is the one doing the asking.
A balanced budget amendment follows a straightforward constitutional path. Article V gives Congress two ways to propose amendments: a two-thirds vote in both chambers or a convention called at the application of two thirds of state legislatures (34 states), with ratification by three quarters of states in either case. Every balanced budget amendment that has ever reached the floor has used the congressional route. Every one has failed.
The closest the country ever came was March 1995. The Republican House, running on the Contract with America, passed the amendment 300-132 — clearing two thirds with room to spare. The Senate needed 67 votes. The recorded tally was 65-35, though Majority Leader Dole voted no for the procedural purpose of preserving reconsideration rights. True support stood at 66, one vote short. The single decisive Republican no came from Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon. His vote would not have been needed at all had Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota not reversed years of public support under direct pressure from the Clinton White House. Daschle’s reversal made Hatfield the story. The arithmetic was simple: Two senators killed what 49 state constitutions had already imposed on their own governments.
In 1997, the Senate voted again. The tally was 66-34 — one short of the 67 required. The decisive defection belonged to Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who had voted for the amendment as a House member, campaigned for the Senate in 1996 as a declared supporter, and then voted no when it counted. He never offered a satisfactory public explanation.
No Senate vote on a balanced budget amendment has been held in the 29 years since.
The most recent House attempt was H.J.Res. 139, introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona and championed on the floor by House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington of Texas, who called the vote a moment for “intellectual honesty”: “Both parties have failed. This institution has failed.” The House voted 211-207 on March 18, 2026 — every Republican yes, every Democrat no except Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas. It wasn’t even close to two thirds. It didn’t need to be a dramatic failure to confirm the pattern. It was an ordinary one.
Congress will not pass a balanced budget amendment for the same reason no legislature in history has voluntarily surrendered its spending authority without external compulsion. Deficit spending isn’t a bug in congressional behavior — it’s the feature that makes congressional careers possible. Benefits win elections. Benefits cost money. Borrowing is how you deliver benefits without presenting the bill in the same term. A balanced budget amendment ends that arrangement. Every member who votes for it is voting to strip future congresses — including their next term — of the tool that sustains incumbency.
I’ve spent thirty years advising institutions whose investment committees operate under legally enforceable fiduciary duties. Borrow recklessly — trustees, regulators, and courts step in. Congress faces none of those constraints. That gap between institutional accountability and congressional self-dealing is structural, and it explains why the only governments in this country that reliably balance their budgets are the ones constitutionally required to do so.
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That’s why 49 states have accomplished what Congress has not. State legislators face the same political incentives. The difference is that most state constitutions imposed balanced budget requirements before the modern political class organized around deficit spending as a career strategy. The structural constraint came first; the political adaptation followed. Congress has never been subject to that constraint and shows no intention of choosing it voluntarily.
This is why the Article V convention route matters. The Founders included it because a Congress with interests adverse to constitutional reform won’t propose amendments that constrain it. In Federalist 85, Alexander Hamilton was explicit: The words of Article V are “peremptory.” Congress “shall call a convention,” and “nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of that body.” He added that “we may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.”
Twenty-seven states have submitted active applications for a balanced budget convention. The Convention of States movement — focused on fiscal restraints, limiting federal power, and term limits — has separately passed its resolution in 20 states. House Budget chairman Arrington introduced H.Con.Res. 15 in 2025 arguing that the balanced budget application count may already have reached 34 states historically, creating a constitutional obligation Congress has ignored. That argument remains contested. What’s not contested is that 34 states acting consistently would create an obligation Congress couldn’t simply ignore.
Critics raise two objections. The runaway convention argument — that a convention called for one purpose could propose amendments on any subject — is disputed by constitutional scholars and unsupported by the historical record; states have effectively limited conventions to stated subjects before. The emergency spending objection is weaker still: Every balanced budget amendment proposal includes supermajority waivers for declared wars and genuine crises. That objection proves too much.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the fiscal year 2026 deficit is $1.9 trillion — not emergency spending, not a wartime exception, not a pandemic response. It is a structural outcome of 40 years of political choices that face no constitutional constraint.
The debt stands at $39.2 trillion. Interest on it will cost every American household roughly $7,700 this fiscal year — just to service what was borrowed in the past. The CBO projects deficits growing to $3.1 trillion annually by 2036. Ronald Reagan said it plainly in 1982: “Only a constitutional amendment will do the job.” The problem was smaller then. The solution was closer. The convention route is slower and harder than Congress proposing the amendment itself. That difficulty is a feature, not a defect — it requires building a durable state-level majority that Congress can’t simply outlast.
That leaves one path. Twenty-seven states have already started walking it. Seven more need to join them, and the institution in American government that actually knows how to balance a budget — because it is constitutionally required to — will have the authority to force the one that doesn’t to try.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a B.S. from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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