The next big eruption out of Albany is going to involve the budget process under the New York State constitution. This issue has been slow to come to the fore in the public debate, but the tip-off that something was up was the new openness surrounding the budget process at Albany. Forgive our cynicism, but when lawmakers who fail for more than two decades to pass a budget on time suddenly pull it off, mugging for the cameras and declaring a reformist victory for the people, you can bet it’s a good idea to hold the applause.

Sure enough, on Tuesday, the Republican-led Senate advanced a resolution to amend a section of the state constitution that deals with the budget. In order for an amendment to pass, both chambers have to approve the proposed change in two consecutive sessions before it goes to the voters in a referendum. Since the Democratic-led Assembly approved the proposal last year and again this year, and the Senate approved it last year and is poised to approve it again this year, the proposal is all but certain to be on the ballot in November.

This is good news for those who like their taxes high and their budgets late. Others will ask, as we have, why lawmakers from both parties are pressing for something that would appear to guarantee both. At the center of the proposed amendment is a contingency budget that automatically goes into effect if lawmakers fail to come up with a final spending plan by a new May 1 deadline. Legislators have argued that because this contingency budget fixes spending at previous-year levels, everyone involved in the process will be working to avoid its enactment.

What they have failed to mention is a provision associated with the contingency budget that transfers power from the executive to the Legislature the moment the budget deadline is missed. According to the amendment language, the contingency budget “shall constitute an act of the Legislature and final action upon all the appropriation bills submitted by the governor.” Translation: Once the deadline strikes, the governor’s budget is invalid, and the Legislature gains the power to rewrite it.

Such a scenario will strike dread in the hearts of advocates of limited government, aware, as they are, that 212 elected officials are likely to spend more money than a governor. It was this very reasoning that caused Alfred E. Smith to preside over a 1927 change to the budget process that vests the executive with the power he now enjoys as “constructor” of the budget and legislators with the relatively benign role of “critics.”

Legislators have carped about the prevailing balance of powers for decades, and began raising their voices on the issue again in December when the state Court of Appeals affirmed the executive’s lead role. Some said the decision would result in the longest budget delay ever. That prediction proved false when the governor and the Legislature passed a budget on time last month for the first time since 1984.

Still, legislative leaders insisted to The New York Sun last week that the amendment, including language on a transfer of power, go forward. It should be obvious that its approval would not only give legislators no incentive to pass a budget on time, but that it would also gut the powers of the governor. As E.J. McMahon, a leading critic of the amendment, tells our Brian McGuire in a related column on the facing page, “If this happens, the governor’s office will be hardly worth having.”

All of which raises a question about those who have given the proposal second passage. If the Assembly really wants the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, to be governor, why would they push for an amendment that would undercut the single most important power a governor wields? The question almost answers itself. Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, the most powerful elected Democrat in the state, is trying to have it both ways.

How? By campaigning publicly for his fellow Democrat, Mr. Silver maintains the appearance of party loyalty and earns the political favor of Mr. Spitzer, who is thought by many to be a lock for the governor’s job. But by pushing privately for a change that would tie Mr. Spitzer’s hands, Mr. Silver ensures that the so-called “Scourge of Wall Street” leaves his talents as a reformer in the attorney general’s office. Which adds up to a test of Mr. Spitzer’s street smarts. If he harbors any hope of going after the political process in Albany with the same zeal he has shown in going after corporate malefactors, the shrewd move would be figuring out a way to halt this constitutional amendment process, lest he accede to a governorship shorn of its powers.