Is there any way to temporarily enforce columnar uniqueness on items currently being inserted?
You could use INSERT IGNORE. This would reject any INSERTs where the primary key or unique key already exists.

If you have to update non-keyed columns in a table in the event that the primary key or unique already exists, you can use INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE. I demonstrated how to use this in another question in the DBA StackExchange.

For your particular query, please make sure the title column is either the primary key or has a unique key defined. Then, INSERT IGNORE and INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE will work for you.

Give it a Try !!!

UPDATE

If the payments table is not too big, try this crazy ideas

Create a UNIQUE INDEX on this one-off

ALTER TABLE payments ADD UNIQUE INDEX title_amount_due_date (title, amount, due_date);


Perform your INSERTs IGNORE from the multiple servers. When done...

ALTER TABLE payments DROP INDEX title_amount_due_date