As Pat Garofalo explained earlier today, ratifying a Balanced Budget Amendment is a terrible idea that would “mandate perverse actions in the face of recessions.” And congressional Republicans took this terrible idea and made it even worse by demanding that Congress not only approve such an amendment, but that the amendment also include provisions that make it impossible to raise taxes and that require spending cuts so steep that it would have made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional.

Perhaps in response to the congressional GOP’s Balance The Budget On The Backs of Seniors And The Middle-Class While Protecting Millionaires From Taxes Amendment, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) recently introduced an amendment of his own. Unfortunately, the Udall amendment includes a balanced budget provision which would prohibit stimulative deficit spending during a recession unless three-fifths of the Congress agrees to allow such spending. Nevertheless, the proposed amendment also includes an encouraging provision that would prohibit Congress from prioritizing tax cuts to millionaires over fiscal responsibility:

SECTION 6. Congress shall not pass any bill that provides a net reduction in individual income taxes for those with incomes over $1,000,000 (as may be adjusted by Congress to account for inflation) if, after enactment, total outlays would exceed total receipts in any fiscal year affected by the bill.

Had this provision been in effect in 2001, George W. Bush’s disastrous tax cut packages would have been unconstitutional, and the single largest contributor to our present deficits would never have become law:

There are very good reasons why it is not a good idea to write any kind of budgeting amendment into the Constitution. Such amendments force the courts to supervise the federal budgeting process — and courts are not exactly equipped to make these kinds of judgments.

Nevertheless, if Congress insists upon writing measures into the Constitution that help balance the budget, Section 6 of the Udall Amendment could be a good model to consider. If enacted as a standalone amendment, it would restrict the George W. Bushes of the future from blowing up the budget with reckless and unnecessary tax giveaways to the super-rich while still allowing Congress to enact essential financial stimulus in the event of a recession.

Students in Colorado’s Center schools share textbooks and learn their geography from globes that still depict the Soviet Union, Center Superintendent George Welsh testified Monday in the opening day of a landmark case over the state’s flagging support for K-12 education.

Ranked 40th in the amount spent per student for 2008-09 school year, Colorado is coping with a structural gap in its education budget of between $1.4 and $3.6 billion per year. But plaintiffs in the Lobato v Colorado case are not asking the court for additional funds, but instead to mandate the state change its school-funding model.

That model has underfunded public schools for decades, thanks to the “constitutionally impermissible” shortfall created in large part by the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. TABOR–a state constitutional amendment that forces residents to vote on all new tax hikes–limits taxpayer revenue and thus “pits state programs and services against each other for survival each year,” according to a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report:

“TABOR worsened this [education funding] situation in two ways. First, it placed further restrictions on local governments’ control over their own revenue: TABOR limits the annual growth in local property tax revenue to the sum of inflation and a growth factor (such as the change in student enrollment), and it prevents local governments from raising property tax rates without voter approval. Second, by limiting the amount of revenues the state could keep, TABOR made it impossible for the state to maintain its own funding commitment to education — much less to continue making up for the loss of local funding.”

Since TABOR passed in 1992, Colorado’s education budget has failed to keep up with its needs, sending average per-student funding plunging more than $600 in relation to the national average by 2006. In 2007, teachers made nearly 11 percent less than the national average. At the same time, TABOR forced cutbacks that doubled the rate of low-income children without health insurance in 12 years and drove higher-education spending per student to a 15-year low in 2009.

Coloradans shouldn’t have to choose between textbooks and health insurance when it comes to its children. While the Lobato trial process will drag on for months, it demonstrates that TABOR is a failing policy that should serve as a warning for anyone looking to pass further laws mandating tax caps.

And yet GOP lawmakers are pushing for a balanced budget amendment that would pose a similar threat. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who criticized elections as “not working” on the Senate floor last month, wants an amendment that would force a two-thirds supermajority to approve each new tax increase, effectively capping government revenue.

–Sarah Bufkin