The Constitution to the Rescue

Lewis Uhler remembers the meeting at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in December of 1972, when he and then-Governor Ronald Reagan first brought together a group of noted academics to discuss the idea of a spending-limitation amendment to the California constitution. Uhler, a Yale-educated attorney and successful realestate developer who had served Governor Reagan in various administrative posts, was chairman of the Governor’s Tax Reduction Task Force, set up to explore ways that the growth of government could be permanently controlled. To that end, Uhler brought Reagan together with “the best freemarket minds that I could find”—a star-studded group of intellectual luminaries that included Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, and Norman Ture, among others.

“The Governor came in in the afternoon and we debated a variety of ideas,” Uhler recalls. “From that meeting I prepared a lengthy memorandum that laid the whole thing out, the politics as well as the economics, which he [Reagan] read over the Christmas holidays.” During the next month, Uhler, Reagan, and members of the task force were to spend “26 hours in deep discussion and debate on these issues.” Out of those meetings came the “Proposition One” spending-limitation amendment to the state’s constitution. Reagan campaigned vigorously for the proposal but it was voted down in a statewide referendum in the fall of 1973. It was a bitter personal defeat for Reagan, but in many ways it also marked the beginning of a tax-revolt movement that was to spread across the land and lead, eventually, to the spendinglimitation amendment to the United States Constitution that is now pending in Congress.

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Donald Lambro

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Lewis Uhler remembers the meeting at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles in December of 1972, when he and then-Governor Ronald Reagan first brought together a group of noted academics to discuss the idea of a spending-limitation amendment to the California constitution. Uhler, a Yale-educated attorney and successful realestate developer who had served Governor Reagan in various administrative posts, was chairman of the Governor’s Tax Reduction Task Force, set up to explore ways that the growth of government could be permanently controlled. To that end, Uhler brought Reagan together with “the best freemarket minds that I could find”—a star-studded group of intellectual luminaries that included Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, and Norman Ture, among others.

“The Governor came in in the afternoon and we debated a variety of ideas,” Uhler recalls. “From that meeting I prepared a lengthy memorandum that laid the whole thing out, the politics as well as the economics, which he [Reagan] read over the Christmas holidays.” During the next month, Uhler, Reagan, and members of the task force were to spend “26 hours in deep discussion and debate on these issues.” Out of those meetings came the “Proposition One” spending-limitation amendment to the state’s constitution. Reagan campaigned vigorously for the proposal but it was voted down in a statewide referendum in the fall of 1973. It was a bitter personal defeat for Reagan, but in many ways it also marked the beginning of a tax-revolt movement that was to spread across the land and lead, eventually, to the spendinglimitation amendment to the United States Constitution that is now pending in Congress.