Yesterday, Nebraska GOP primary voters nominated dark horse candidate and state Sen. Deb Fischer as their candidate for an open U.S. Senate race this November. In choosing Fischer, the Nebraska GOP aligns itself with a candidate who recently called for a very high stakes game of chicken — flirting with economic catastrophe in order to force Congress to permanently enshrine Tea Party fiscal policy into the Constitution.

During last year’s debt ceiling crisis, which Speaker John Boehner has threatened to repeat next year, House and Senate Republicans threatened to force the United States to default on its debt — an outcome that would have caused “a bigger GDP drop than that experienced during the Great Recession of 2008″ — unless President Obama agreed to an increasingly escalating series of demands for austerity. Even after this campaign of extortion forced the White House to make significant concessions, Fischer indicated that she would have simply let the economy blow up because Congress didn’t also agree to a constitutional amendment:

Nebraska’s 2012 Republican Senate candidates turned thumbs down Monday on the compromise debt reduction plan agreed to by the White House and congressional leaders.

“I would vote no on this specific bill because Congress needs to pass a balanced budget (constitutional) amendment first,” said state Sen. Deb Fischer of Valentine.

It’s not clear which version of the balanced budget amendment Fischer is referring to here, but even the mildest forms of such an amendment are terrible ideas because they prevent the United States from responding to economic downturns or unexpected disasters, while simultaneously turning control of the nation’s budget over to unelected judges who are ill-equipped to handle it.

Moreover, at the time that Fischer endorsed blowing up the economy unless Congress votes to change the Constitution, the leading Republican proposal for such an amendment imposed such draconian spending cuts that it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” The lead sponsor of this plan to trigger a new Great Depression, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), also called for forcing a debt default unless Congress gives him everything he wants.

In other words, while little is known about the obscure state lawmaker who wants to join the United States Senate, her willingness to play chicken with America’s prosperity strongly suggests that she would line up with the most hardline members of the Republican caucus.

Earlier this afternoon, just 261 members of the House voted in favor of a balanced budget amendment — far fewer that the two-thirds majority necessary for the amendment to move forward. One somewhat surprising “no” vote was House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI). Ryan is the House GOP’s chief Chicken Little on the deficit — Ryan spent the last two years of his life running around the country warning that the sky would fall unless we phase out Medicare and enact a long list of equally draconian budget reforms.

Yet, today, when Chicken Little had the opportunity to write a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution, he ran away screaming that the amendment wouldn’t do enough to transform the Constitution into a Tea Party fantasy:

The backstory here is that, just a few months ago, Ryan and his fellow congressional Republicans were pushing a permanent austerity amendment that would effectively lock Tea Party fiscal policy in place permanently. Among other things, amendment would make it functionally impossible to ever raise taxes, while simultaneously requiring the federal government to balance its budget entirely through spending cuts.

Were Paul Ryan’s fantasy scenario — a balanced budget achieved entirely through cuts — to actually play out, it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.”

The amendment Ryan rejected today, by contrast, contains no provision preventing the budget from being balanced through higher taxes — possibly even on rich people! This would allow Congress to save a percentage of these jobs by shifting the cost of deficit reduction to people who can afford it, but it would not protect the interests of the very wealthiest Americans. So Ryan voted it down.

Let’s be completely clear about what this means. Given the choice between an option that would kill 15 million jobs & drive the nation into another great depression, and a different option that could kill fewer jobs but would also not guarantee that David Koch and Paris Hilton pay low taxes, the House GOP’s top budget policymaker decided that he would rather protect poor Paris and hold out for the option that would force millions of American families into utter destitution.

Later today, the House is expected to begin debate on a balanced budget amendment, with most of the amendment’s supporters hoping that it will impose sweeping and permanent austerity upon the United States. As ThinkProgress reported, if this amendment actually succeeded in balancing the budget entirely through spending cuts, it would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” In other words, America would almost instantly suffer consequences that rival the Great Depression.

Yet, for those of us who are still old enough to remember when conservatives feared “activist judges,” the right’s recently invigorated obsession with writing fiscal policy into the Constitution is nothing less than bizarre. As Neil Kinkopf, a former constitutional advisor to the Clinton and Obama Administration explains, the most likely way to enforce this kind of amendment would be by requiring judges to strike down budgets that aren’t balanced — placing our fiscal policy in the hands the public officials who are least suited to make such decisions:

Our independent federal judiciary is highly skilled at deciding legal questions. It is not at all competent to make decisions of a political or policy nature. Judges are not, generally speaking, trained in matters of economics or finance. They have no special competency that would recommend committing such decisions to them. . . . Finally, legislators are politically accountable for their decisions. Judges are not and should not be. Decisions regarding how to achieve a balanced budget are precisely the type of decisions that involve will and not judgment, to use Hamilton’s phrase, and so should be made by accountable officials rather than judges.

Don’t trust former Clinton and Obamaistas? How about Robert Bork, the failed Supreme Court nominee who became the centerpiece of the legal conservative movement’s persecution complex? Here’s what he had to say about balanced budget amendments:

Also troubling is the problem of enforcing such a constitutional provision. In the early stages of discussion, a lot of people, including most economists, apparently thought this was no problem: if Congress exceeded the constitutional limits on spending, someone would sue. That much is true. The result, however, would likely be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits around the country, many of them on inconsistent theories and providing inconsistent results. By the time the Supreme Court straightened the whole matter out, the budget in question would be at least four years out of date and lawsuits involving the next three fiscal years would be slowly climbing toward the Supreme Court.

Bork, of course, is right to be worried about the judiciary’s unfitness to balance the budget. If the Supreme Court strikes down the 2014 budget in 2016, what happens next? Does the government have to take back the money it already spent, and if so, how? And what does this do to America’s credit rating if every bill sent to the federal government is subject to reexamination by nine judges in black robes?

But, none of this will probably bother the kind of conservatives who now dominate Congress. They were willing to push America to the brink of fiscal implosion during the debt ceiling fight earlier this year. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a leading supporter of a balanced budget amendment, even admitted he wants America’s “house to come down” unless we agreed to his extortionist demand to rewrite the Constitution.

So conservative lawmakers have demonstrated time and time again through their actions that they don’t care one bit if their reckless tactics destroy the American economy. They have made absolutely clear, however, that they will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the rich, even though doing so is one of the least harmful ways to bring the budget closer to balance.

And that’s the real reason why conservatives in Congress would oppose the upcoming balanced budget amendment if they had any idea what it would actually entail — and it explains why the right-wing Heritage Foundation is already whining that this version of the amendment doesn’t do anything to save David Koch and Paris Hilton from paying more taxes.

In a week, the GOP will again vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, the cockamamie economic proposal they have toyed with several times over the last several months, including during the debate over raising the debt ceiling. The vote is part of the final compromise to raise the debt limit, in which President Obama and Senate Democrats promised to hold a vote on such an amendment, despite the fact that such votes have failed numerous times in the past.

Republicans have taken to ignoring the obvious perilous consequences of the amendment even as voices on both sides of the aisle denounce it as the “worst idea in Washington.” The current amendment, former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett said, “looks like it was drafted by a couple of interns on the back of a napkin.” Today, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) added to that criticism, releasing a study highlighting a piece from Macroeconomic Advisers that notes that such an amendment would make future recessions “deeper and longer” and saying that if a BBA had been enacted prior to the 2008 recession, the “effect on the economy” would have been “catastrophic.”

And according to CBPP, passing a Balanced Budget Amendment now, with the country trying to climb out of the hole of joblessness caused by the recession, would have the exact opposite affect one would expect policy makers to try and achieve. In fact, the budget cuts required by such an amendment now would double the unemployment rate and slide the country back into the throes of recession:

If the 2012 budget were balanced through spending cuts, those cuts would total about $1.5 trillion in 2012 alone, the analysis estimates. Those cuts would throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.

That should be a reality check for Republicans who claim to be focused on job creation. Yet, despite evidence that the amendment would have disastrous consequences for our economy, Republicans — even those who pitch themselves as credible on the economy, like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — continue to support it. Some even distort the past positions of Democrats to make it look like the proposal has bipartisan support.

In reality, such an amendment would only serve to exacerbate the very problems the GOP says it is trying to fix. And, as CBPP notes, the idea is utterly impractical: “[T]he only way to implement a BBA without some fiscal drag is to ratify it when the budget is in balance or surplus. Of course, then we wouldn’t have needed the BBA to achieve balance in the first place.”