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.”

In an interview with conservative CNSNews, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) made a revealing claim. He opposes a balanced budget amendment that doesn’t also include draconian spending caps and a provision making it nearly impossible to raise taxes:

One of the reasons I voted “no” on the debt ceiling deal is because it was supposed to be an important lever for us to get a vote on a balanced budget amendment, but they did not have first a definition for a balanced budget amendment…[that] has a supermajority [to raise taxes] and an 18 percent GDP cap in it. [...] If we pass something out of the House that’s meant as a constitutional amendment that has no heat then we have no results then it will look like we are just posturing ourselves rather than actually fixing the problem.

Listen:

It’s hard to read King’s statement as anything less than an admission that he doesn’t really care whether the budget is balanced. In 1995, the House passed a true balanced budget amendment, which would have made it very difficult to enact an unbalanced budget. Had this actual balanced budget amendment been in effect in 2001, for example, the single largest driver of our present deficits — the Bush tax cuts — would have been unconstitutional. Likewise, the House GOP’s Medicare-killing budget that passed the House earlier this year also would fail under a clean balanced budget amendment because it fails to raise enough taxes to cover its costs.

Needless to say, congressional Republicans don’t like this outcome, which is why they are currently dressing up a Tea Party fantasy amendment in balanced budget amendment clothing. The so-called “balanced budget amendment” that King supports does far more than simply requiring federal spending to equal federal revenues. It makes it functionally impossible to raise taxes by imposing a two-thirds supermajority requirement — a provision closely modeled after the California anti-tax amendment that blew up that state’s finances. It would also require spending cuts so steep that it would have made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional.

Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that he supports this Tea Party amendment because it eliminates the ability of something as silly as the American people voting for candidates who don’t want Tea Party fiscal policy from actually having an impact on national policy. Rep. King’s opposition to a clean balanced budget amendment is just one more admission that Congressional Republicans don’t actually care a bit about balancing the budget — they just want to use the American people’s legitimate anxiety over our long term deficits to permanently enshrine a comprehensive Tea Party agenda in the Constitution.

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.

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.