Conservative members of Congress are not being very helpful in the debt ceiling debate. The Republican-led House of Representatives earlier this week voted through their "solution" to the problem in the form of the so-called “Cut, Cap, and Balance” bill. But the House likely only voted on the bill because they couldn’t get enough votes for the bill conservatives actually wanted: a balanced budget amendment filled with conservative policy goals. But with the Senate unlikely to pass the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill, Congress might turn to the next worse alternative: a plain balanced budget amendment.

The Cut, Cap, and Balance bill does what its name implies. First, it cuts the fiscal year (FY) 2012 budget, which Congress is currently debating, by $111 billion, putting non-security discretionary spending to pre-2008 levels. Next, it sets caps on spending for the next ten years, limiting spending to 19.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and likely requiring untold hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending cuts.

While these two steps alone would drastically reshape the federal government, the last part of the plan is even worse. The “balance” part of the bill prevents the Treasury from raising the debt ceiling until Congress sends a balanced budget amendment to the states for ratifications. And not just any balanced budget resolution. The bill specifically says that Congress must approve of a bill such as House Joint Resolution (HJRes) 1.

HJRes 1 has been attacked (frequently by OMB Watch) for the fact that it isn’t about balancing the budget. With provisions limiting federal spending to 18 percent of GDP, a level last seen in the 1960s, and requiring congressional supermajorities for raising revenue or increasing the debt limit, the amendment before Congress is far different from the balanced budget amendments considered back in the Clinton era. If HJRes 1 were in effect today, it would require cuts of about $632 billion for FY 2012, more than ten times larger than the FY 2011 cuts passed earlier this year.

Fortunately, it seems that our message is getting through. Despite balanced budget amendments easily passing the House and coming one vote short in the Senate in the late 1990s, HJRes 1 is not getting nearly as much support. Many members of Congress who had supported the amendment in the past are not supporting it today, citing the additional provisions.

In fact, the lack of support is likely why the House instead voted on Cut, Cap, and Balance the other night. Faced with a vote, HJRes 1 by itself probably would not have reached the 2/3rds threshold necessary to approve a Constitutional amendment. So, instead, House leadership put forward a regular bill, which only requires a majority vote to succeed, that merely requires the future passage of HJRes 1. That way leadership can go into the election saying that the House “voted for” the balanced budget amendment without taking the tough loss of failing to clear the difficult constitutional hurdle with HJRes 1. Win-win.

But the demise of the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill may clear the way for a “plain vanilla” balanced budget amendment such as HJRes 2. That amendment strips away the most controversial aspects of HJRes 1, although it still requires an impossible supermajority vote in both houses in order to raise the debt ceiling (and the current battle in Congress should demonstrate how good of an idea that is). Accordingly, HJRes 2 has almost a hundred more cosponsors than its more drastic cousin, leaving it within reach of 2/3rds support and far more likely to actually pass the House.

While there isn’t a similar bill yet in the Senate, since every member of the Republican caucus supports the Senate version of HJRes 1, a plain balanced budget amendment would only need eighteen Democratic votes to pass. A vote on such a bill in the Senate would likely be another nail-biter, an ugly battle over the vote of every moderate member. But since HJRes 1 would only garner a handful of Democratic votes at best in the Senate, a plain amendment stands a far better chance of passing.

In a sense, the focus on HJRes 1 and its conservative provisions is unfortunate, since even the plain balanced budget amendment would wreck the American economy. As we have written in the past, a normal balanced budget would restrict the government’s ability to respond to economic crises, slowing our already anemic recovery. Make no mistake: a plain balanced budget amendment, even one with provisions protecting certain programs, would be just as bad as HJRes 1. Both would do great harm to the nation at the worst possible moment.

The House’s Cut, Cap, and Balance bill will tentatively come up for a vote in the Senate on Friday, and it seems likely to go down in defeat. Hopefully, the failure of the bill will be the last we hear of a balanced budget amendment. If not, and Congress does switch to a pared back version, the no votes of thirteen states may be the only thing stopping the inclusion of a balanced budget amendment in the Constitution.