There is a lightness in his step as former state Senate President James Clark Jr. walks about his Ellicott City farm these days.
The goal he has pursued for 20 years -- passage of a federal balanced budget amendment -- seems nearly within his grasp. "It's center stage, isn't it?" he says proudly.
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time passed a bill calling for the amendment. The measure goes to a Senate vote today, and a close vote is expected.
Even if the measure fails today, it is considered to have a good chance of passing later. If the measure passes, it will have to be ratified by 38 of the 50 states to become law.
For two decades, Mr. Clark has been traveling around the country working to get states to do just that. He has succeeded with 32. Getting six others to go along "will be awful hard," he concedes. But with a few breaks, it could happen.
"Jim is the pioneer of the balanced budget amendment, not a populist latecomer," says Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, a 3rd District Democrat who was speaker of the state House of Delegates when Mr. Clark was state Senate president. "He said way back when that we were following the wrong course. He is [still] a credible force -- very, very sincere."
But Mr. Clark -- who during 28 years in the state legislature was often out front and sometimes alone on social issues -- will not feel "comfortable" with many current supporters of the amendment, Mr. Cardin predicts. "He truly believes in bringing down the deficit," unlike some current supporters who want to use the amendment as a way to cut social welfare programs, he says.
Congress "has tried statutes and everything else and always disregarded them," Mr. Clark says. But "if it's in the Constitution, they can't disobey it," he says.
"The Constitution is a powerful thing -- invented by man to protect the governed from the excesses of those who govern," Mr. Clark says. "All this debt is one of the greatest excesses you can imagine -- borrowing against the future."
There are only three ways to get rid of debt, Mr. Clark says. "Repudiate it, service it or deflate [the value of the currency] -- which is the course government most often takes. We may be observing the greatest country on earth destroying itself. It's a mathematical certainty unless we change course. We've done about all the maneuvering we can."
Mr. Clark set out 20 years ago to try to force Congress to change its ways -- primarily by using the threat of a constitutional convention. It was a tactic that had been used successfully earlier this century to force Congress to allow direct election of senators, he says. Previously, U.S. senators had been elected by state legislatures.
Mr. Clark quietly included the call for a constitutional convention in a balanced budget amendment resolution passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1975. His resolution urged Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment or call a convention for the purpose of requiring a balanced budget amendment.
Constitutional amendments require ratification by three-fourths of the states -- 38 of 50 -- but a constitutional convention can be called by two-thirds of the states, 34 of 50. Mr. Clark's goal was to line up 33 -- one short of the number needed, but enough to force Congress to act to avoid a convention.
He enlisted the help of James Dale Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, and together they began a nationwide lobbying effort. Soon, the Maryland resolution was being copied throughout the United States. But the drive stalled one state short of 33.
"Not many of his colleagues were as prescient as he," Mr. Davidson says of Mr. Clark. "He was right on target. What he said was right, what he did was right, what he forecast was right. He provided the prime impetus to get [the amendment drive] going. He energized it.
"He put the issue simply. I tend to take his simplicity and make it complex. But one of the simple things he said to me years ago really struck me: 'If you don't put it in this Constitution, it will be the first thing put in the next one.' "
In the 1980s, Mr. Clark's goal expanded from getting states to pass the balanced budget resolution to keeping them from rescinding it. Opponents feared that if a convention was called, the Constitution could be completely rewritten, potentially jeopardizing the Bill of Rights and other civil liberties.
But Mr. Clark, who retired from the state Senate in 1986, says that would never happen. Congress wouldn't let a convention take place, he believes. Even if it did, convention actions would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
Still, Maryland tried three times in the early 1980s to rescind the resolution. It came close to being rescinded in 1983 when the House of Delegates voted 81-45 for repeal. But the House needed concurrence from the state Senate, which Mr. Clark was not about to let happen.
Although deposed as Senate president in 1982 in a political coup led by Melvin A. "Mickey" Steinberg, then a state senator, and Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., the current Senate president, Mr. Clark was still highly respected. He vowed to filibuster if the repeal bill came to the floor.
No legislator doubted his resolve. Although 64 at the time -- he is now 76 -- he still possessed the mettle he showed as a 22-year-old glider pilot in World War II, when he twice landed paratroopers behind enemy lines during combat. The move for repeal never came to a vote.
Of World War II, he says, he stands "in awe of the effort we [as a nation] made in that war."
If the nation solved that crisis, it can solve this one, he says, but it will mean political sacrifices by Congress. "The people can't do it on their own," Mr. Clark says. "We need the Constitution to protect us. Congress has got to be disciplined. If not, we will come to a bad end."