After the first round of the contentious debt limit fight, congressional Republicans are redoubling their efforts to push through a so-called Balanced Budget Amendment as a solution to the country’s financial woes. Last week, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told GOP House members that the best thing they could do during the August recess was to sell the BBA to their constituents. Republicans have even suggested that Standard & Poor’s recent downgrade of U.S. debt from its sterling AAA rating would not have happened, or could be reversed, if a Balanced Budget Amendment were passed.

This weekend the head of S&P, John Chambers, publicly dismissed that idea as foolhardy when he said passage of a BBA would hurt, not help, America’s creditworthiness. Chambers, S&P’s managing director, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that a balanced budget measure “would just reduce your flexibility in a crisis”:

BLITZER: Would it be important or not that important for Congress to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution?

CHAMBERS: In general, we think that fiscal rules like these just diminish the flexibility of the government to respond. Also, when Congress has a long track record of trying to bind itself with various rules…But when push comes to shove, they don’t bind very much. So even if you had a Balanced Budget Amendment, you’d have some questions about it’s credibility, and it would just reduce your flexibility in a crisis.

Watch it:

Chambers also said it could take as long as a decade for the U.S. to regain its AAA rating, spurning GOP suggestions that a hasty and drastic revision to the U.S. Constitution could automatically fix the downgrade. The Republican plan would require a balanced budget for each fiscal year and cap spending at 18 percent of GDP.

As Chambers said, a balanced budget amendment would tie government’s hands and render it unable to take corrective measures during a recession. By slashing spending and mandating “perverse actions in the face of recessions,” it would greatly damage America’s already weak economy — which is why five Nobel Prize-winning economists have denounced the idea.

Federal law requires state Medicaid programs to pay doctors enough money to ensure that Medicaid patients will have access to the same quality of care as everyone else. Last June, however, former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal filed an ill-considered amicus brief siding with parties that want to render this and many other essential protections for Medicaid recipients almost completely unenforceable. In response to this brief, Democratic leaders in Congress filed their own brief yesterday challenging the Obama Administration’s unfortunate position:

The Democratic leaders said Medicaid beneficiaries must be allowed to file suit to enforce their right to care — and to challenge Medicaid cuts being made by states around the country.

The Obama administration maintains that beneficiaries and health care providers cannot sue state officials to challenge cuts in Medicaid payment rates, even if such cuts compromise access to care for the poor.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the lawmakers said the administration’s position “would undermine the effectiveness of Medicaid.” In addition, they said, it conflicts with more than a century of court precedents that allow people to sue to block state actions that are inconsistent with federal law.

In essence, DOJ’s brief claims that the Medicaid law cannot be enforced by lawsuits brought by individual Medicaid providers. Only the administration can require states to follow the law. This claim not only conflicts with well-established Supreme Court precedents. It also would eviscerate enforcement of Medicaid law because the administration neither has the resources to discover every violation of the statute nor sufficient resources to bring an enforcement action where ever one is needed.

Worse, when President Obama leaves office, he could be replaced by someone much more hostile to Medicaid. One presidential contender, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) even floated the possibility of opting his state out of Medicaid entirely. If an anti-Medicaid president were to take up residence in the White House, much of the Medicaid law could effectively cease to exist until a more progressive president is elected.

Americans depend on federal regulators to keep them safe literally every single day. FDA regulations ensure that our medicines are safe, effective, and reasonably free from toxic side effects. Vehicle safety regulations allow us to buy cars that enable us to survive an accident. Before the federal government started regulating food safety, something as innocuous as a bottle of ketchup could contain a toxic mix of mold, rot, and spices added to cover up the flavor of decay.

And yet, House Republicans would effectively shut down these regulators’ ability to perform the most basic functions of their job:

The GOP will make a major push this fall for the REINS Act, which would require all major regulations to get a vote in Congress. [...] Unions and consumer groups are outraged over the REINS Act and have been lobbying against it.

They say it will severely delay regulations, increase corporate influence over health and safety rules through increased lobbying and allow politics to displace science. Especially problematic for them is a provision that if Congress does not approve a regulation within 70 days, it is cancelled and cannot be considered again.

House Republicans claim that REINS will simply provide an additional layer of congressional oversight before a federal agency can improve vehicle safety standards or reduce greenhouse emissions or streamline the FDA’s process for approving new drugs, but the actual effect of REINS would be to completely freeze much of the federal regulatory structure in place — permanently.

For one thing, while REINS’ chief sponsor claims that it would prevent new regulations from being filibustered in the Senate, the bill does not account for a loophole in the Senate rules. As a result, all but the most insignificant new federal regulations would be shut down completely unless they could somehow earn supermajority support in the Senate.

And even if the Senate somehow decided to put aside its partisan differences and start approving rules, it’s not even clear that it would have enough time to do so. Last year, the Senate simply sat on literally hundreds of bills that passed the House — many of them unanimously — because it didn’t have enough time to pass them. In 2010, federal agencies issued more than 90 new rules that would have required congressional approval within a narrow 70-day window if REINS were enacted. It’s anyone’s guess where Congress would find the time to approve all these rules.

Nor is it even clear how REINS would advance the right’s deregulatory agenda. As Sally Katzen, a former chief overseer of the federal regulatory process, points out, “Agencies sometimes propose eliminating outdated rules. But even these efforts at regulatory streamlining would nonetheless get caught in the REINS Act net, as deregulatory rules are nevertheless still rules.”

In short, REINS would place every major federal safety regulation, every agency’s major effort to rein in Wall Street, and even every major effort to reduce the burden of federal regulations in the hands of a body that just spent two months trying to decide whether to force America into a catastrophic economic default. If Congress can’t even agree to not blow up the entire U.S. economy, it unclear why anyone thinks that it could pass just one of the dozens of new measures REINS would require it to approve every year.