When Robert Bork agrees with Laurence Tribe, and with just about every other law professor and mainstream economist in the land, and with President Bill Clinton; and when the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is in sync with those of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and when they are all united against something, it’s awfully tempting to be for it.

The push for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is what they all oppose- intermittently, in the president’s case.

And so I’d like to be for it. I’d like to agree with literal sage Michael Kinsley, whose contrarian side wrote in 1992 (and still believes) that it’s time to "call this hoary Republican bluff," because "the nation’s deficit addiction must… be cured." I’d also like to agree with conservative sage James Q. Wilson, a "reluctant convert" who last year called the balanced budget amendment "a bad idea whose time has come," and a necessary cure for the public’s "free-lunch mentality."

I’d like to agree, but I can’t quite get there.

That’s because the more you look at the various proposed formulations of the balanced budget amendment-which came close to passing Congress in 1995 and will have more support in the newly elected Congress-the more clear it becomes that (in Bork’s words) this "cure seems likely to be either ineffective or damaging, or both."

In addition, the view that the voters are hopelessly addicted to mortgaging our children’s future-through reckless deficit spending from which we can save ourselves only by amending the Constitution-is a bit less convincing now than it was a few years ago.

We have, in fact, made remarkable progress since fiscal 1992, when the annual deficit peaked at $290 billion. By then, years of bipartisan profligacy during the Reagan and Bush presidencies had pushed the total debt held by the public to an alarming 50 percent of the gross domestic product-up from 27 percent when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981- and had more than doubled the interest burden, from about 1.5 percent to about 3.5 percent of GDP.

Things are better now. By fiscal 1996 (which ended Sept 30), the annual deficit was down to $107 billion-just 1.4 percent of GDP. That made it the lowest percentage of GDP since 1974, and far below the 1983 figure of 6.1 percent

In addition, the voters’ rejection this year of Bob Dole’s free-lunch 15 percent tax cut may signal a healthy turn toward fiscal responsibility and away from die attitudes that prompted Kinsley to write (in 1992): "The voters are hypocrites about federal spending: hating it in general, cherishing it in the particular…. |D]eficit spending has become a medicine we Americans can’t be trusted with. We use it when we’ve sick, then when we’re healthy we just increase the dosage."

Lately, we’ve teen cutting the dosage.

Granted, we haven’t been cutting it enough; with the economy as healthy as it has been, we should probably be running a surplus, and retiring a chunk of the national debt. And granted, the deficit numbers threaten to start going up again soon-and to go through the roof when the baby boomers start retiring on the public dole.

So this is no time for complacency about the continuing him of our modern political culture toward excessive deficit spending or about the risk of an escalating deficit disaster.

That brings me to the most fundamental reason for opposing a balanced budget amendment: It seems likely to do more harm than good. Indeed, the immediate effect would probably be to increase the deficit next year and perhaps for several years.

That’s because many members-especially the Republicans, whose hypocrisy on this issue may outdo even the Democrats-would love to vote for the illusion of a balanced budget, to give themselves cover for voting against the reality of one. While whooping for the amendment-which might never be ratified by the states, and in any event would not take effect for years-these members will continue to wallow in fiscal irresponsibility-seeking unwarranted tax cuts, supporting profligate spending on pork-barrel projects and entitlements, and doing nothing about the impending bankruptcies of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds.

The quickest route to understanding why the amendment is no long-term solution is (as Alan Morrison of the Public Citizen Litigation Group points out) to ask the amendment’s sponsors how it would be enforced-and why the language they favor doesn’t say how it would be enforced.

There are three possible answers to the first question: (1) The courts would enforce the amendment (like other constitutional provisions), by entertaining individual lawsuits: (2) the president would enforce it, by impounding appropriated funds; or (3) nobody would enforce it, except perhaps the voters.

The prospect of judicial enforcement is so appalling that even fervent sponsors of the amendment, like Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), fall all over themselves assuring us that the courts wouldn’t dare.

Suggesting that the amendment would be "judicially ‘unenforceable,’" Hatch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last year that "[l]ong-standing constitutional and legal doctrines would keep the courts out of the budget and tax questions that are the duties of the political branches."

Maybe he’s right. Maybe the courts would cite the political question and standing doctrines and, to boot, Alexander Hamilton’s pledge (in The Federalist No. 78) that the judiciary would have "no influence over either the sword or the purse."

The courts should keep their hands off the budget. But don’t bet the ranch that they will. Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum from Tribe to Bork warn that, unless the amendment explicitly bars judicial enforcement, there can be no assurance that the courts won’t try to enforce it.

Judicial enforcement is "either a vain hope or a dismal prospect," as Bork wrote in a 1990 letter to Congress. Congress can evade the amendment’s intent in myriad ways, he noted, Hanging from "an estimate of total receipts for a fiscal year that was too optimistic" to using regulatory powers to put the costs of programs on the backs of business and other private-sector groups (and indirectly on the same populace that pays the taxes).

If the courts decide to assert enforcement power, as Bork wrote, ‘hundreds of suits might be filed in federal district courts around the country…. The confusion, not to mention the burden on the court system, would be enormous. Nothing would be settled, moreover, until one or more of such actions reached the Supreme Court…Nor is it at all clear what could be done if the court found that the amendment had been violated five years earlier."

In the end, judicial enforcement could mean putting the budgetary process under continuous judicial supervision, with courts seeking to remedy any deficits either by ordering Congress to raise taxes, or by deciding what cuts to make in spending, or both. "That outcome cannot be desired by anyone, including the courts," as Bork wrote.

How about presidential enforcement, through impoundments? Equally intolerable. It’s not clear whether such an impoundment power-like the far more modest line-item veto power that Congress has already conferred on the president, starting in January-would help much in cutting the deficit. It is clear that this would be by far the most dramatic (and unwise) shift of power from the legislative branch to the executive in the history of the republic.

For these reasons, the only kind of balanced budget amendment even worth considering would be one specifying that it is unenforceable either by the judiciary or by presidential Impoundment.

James Q. Wilson suggests that such an amendment would be worth having: "Voters are the problem," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal "The balanced budget amendment is aimed at them, not at politicians….[C]hallengers [could] run against incumbents by saying, not simply that they didn’t cut spending or didn’t fund a popular program, but that they violated the Constitution. The enforcement of this amendment will be political, not legal."

But if the voters can’t acquire the will to enforce fiscal responsibility more directly, I doubt that they can acquire it by adopting an otherwise unenforceable constitutional amendment.

And as the Justice Department’s Walter Dellinger, now the acting solicitor general, told Congress in 1995: "To have the Constitution declare that the budget shall be balanced, while providing no mechanism to make that happen, would place an empty promise in the fundamental charter of our government and lead to countess constitutional violations. Moreover, to have a provision of the Constitution routinely violated would inevitably make all other provisions of the Constitution seem far less inviolable."

Sometimes the conventional wisdom of the intellectual elite (sorry, Judge Bork, you’re part of it) is right.