MISSOURI COMMENTARY: CONSTITUTION: AMEND IT IN BULK?

Speaker Newt Gingrich seems to want to amend the Constitution in bulk: balanced budget, term limits, prayer in schools -- maybe even a constitutional amendment requiring a three-fifths supermajority in Congress for any tax increase.

Throughout our history, thousands of constitutional amendments have been proposed. Thankfully, Congress and the states take the amending process seriously and don't willy-nilly amend our great document of governance on whim and caprice. The Constitution has been amended 27 times in 200 years, with 10 of those, constituting our Bill of Rights, coming together shortly after the Constitution was adopted. Two amendments, the 18th and 21st, dealt with prohibition and canceled out each other.

In the balance-the-budget debate, some of the Senate old timers like Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Mark Hatfield of Oregon placed great emphasis on the notion that Congress should not tinker with our most sacred document. Noble as that is, it alone would not have carried the day.

Throwing the issue of Social Security into the debate caused the balance-the-budget amendment to fail. To many Americans, Social Security is more sacred than the Constitution itself. Social Security is running big surpluses now. It will begin sinking deeply in debt by 2019 when the "baby boomers" are retiring in avalanche proportions. While it for now has a growing surplus, that surplus is used to offset part of our great deficit. Without the Social Security surplus, that's no way to balance the budget in the proximate future.

Two not very well known senators from north Dakota, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, diverted the balance the budget debate when they threw Social Security into the pot. The polls show that 80 percent of the people favor a balanced-budget amendment, but only 32 percent favor it if it takes a dime out of Social Security.

Senator Robert Dole, the skillful majority leader, well knows that when you start mixing Social Security into a Congressional debate, you're headed for trouble. It's one thing for Speak Gingrich, still functioning as a de facto tsar, to ram a constitutional amendment through the House. It's another thing for Dole to guide it through the stubborn Senate.

Senator Phil Gramm, Dole's arch rival, is crying on the outside, laughing on the inside over the defeat of the balance-the-budget amendment. Gramm, Gingrich and even Rush Limbaugh view it as a failure of Dole leadership.

It's hard to cast a one-vote shortfall as a political debacle for Dole. Yet politics is a game of winning or losing. There is no blue ribbon for coming close. The ultimate test of Dole's leadership is yet to come. Assume Gingrich succeeds in passing all or almost all of his Contract With America package. How much of it can Dole grind out of the Senate? How much of it does he want to grind out?

Dole often points out that the Contract With America binds only the Republicans in the House. Technically this is true. Yet it may tend to bind Dole psychologically as more and more of it comes over from the House.

To the extent that Dole separates himself from the Gingrich agenda, he separates himself from the true-believer Republicans who exercise extraordinary influence in the primaries and caucuses. The GOP once had a Bull Moose or liberal wing. That wing has been amputated. There is still a nervous moderate wing which, at one time, included George Bush and, even today, would include Governors William Weld of Massachusetts, Christine Whitman of New Jersey and Pete Wilson of California.

Where's Bob Dole? To the extent he adheres to Gingrich's signals, he becomes a true believer keeping pace with Gramm on the right. To the extent he distances himself a bit from Gingrich, he better positions himself for the November election, but not for the primaries and caucuses.

American presidential elections are a fight for the center. Whenever a party is perceived as drifting too far left or too far right, it's in trouble. Americans are centrist by nature and instinct.

Bill Clinton watches dole's discomfort with polite glee. As he see it, the further Dole moves to the right, the better for him. To Clinton, NOvember '94 was not a permanent right wing repositioning of the two parties. Rather he sees it as an outpouring of political disaffection -- correctable over time.

If Clinton is wrong, if Gingrich and Gramm are right in thinking that a revolution is in being for a long haul, then we can expect many further constitutional amendments to be debated and voted on. Founding Fathers, be alert.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.