With President Barack Obama now threatening to veto any proposal to balance the budget, it’s helpful to look back on the record of his vice president, Joe Biden. Biden is, after all, supposed to be the wise and experienced part of the ticket.

Verum Serum did a search of CSPAN’s archives and discovered that then-Senator Biden not only voted in favor of such an amendment in the mid-90s, but in 1995 he bragged about authoring his own version back in the 1980s.

VS has the video if you’d like to watch, but I’m providing the text of a New York Times article from February 1995 that provides the same gist:

Two more Democrats today joined the ranks of senators who support a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution…The two Democrats who declared today, Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Tom Harkin of Iowa, opposed the amendment last year, the last time it came before the Senate…

Both Senators said their doubts had been overtaken by fears that uncontrolled Federal spending was wrecking the economy and pilfering prosperity from future generations.

Senator Biden said he had concluded that an amendment would force the Republican Congress to confront the need for broad spending cuts and tax increases, not merely cuts in unpopular social programs. But the true imperative, he said, is to prevent the Federal debt from consuming the resources for programs of every political stripe.

“Unless this thing gets focused,” he said in an interview, “by the time we face the music, everything I care about is going to be gone.”

Biden 1995: We need a balanced budget amendment to avoid disaster.

Biden 2011: We need more unrestrained spending to avoid an unrestrained spending problem.

So…progress.