Howard Jay Phillips (February 3, 1941 – April 20, 2013) was an American politician and activist. A political
conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization ...
, Phillips was a
United States presidential candidate who served as the chairman of
The Conservative Caucus, a
conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization ...
public policy advocacy group which he founded in 1974. Phillips was a founding member of the
U.S. Taxpayers Party, which later became known as the
Constitution Party.
Personal life
Phillips was born into a
Jewish family in Boston in 1941, Phillips
converted to
evangelical Christianity as an adult in the 1970s
and was subsequently associated with
Christian Reconstructionism
Christian reconstructionism is a fundamentalist Calvinist theonomic movement. It developed primarily under the direction of Rousas Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North and has had an important influence on the Christian right in the United ...
.
A 1962 graduate of
Harvard College in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge becam ...
, Massachusetts, he was twice elected chairman of the
Student Council, and was lauded by “The Cross and the Flag,” a
Ku Klux Klan magazine, for his “patriotic” ideological bent. Phillips publicly and immediately disavowed the Klan. Phillips was also president of Policy Analysis, Inc., a public policy research organization which publishes the bimonthly ''Issues and Strategy Bulletin''.
Phillips resided in
Fairfax County
Fairfax County, officially the County of Fairfax, is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is part of Northern Virginia and borders both the city of Alexandria and Arlington County and forms part of the suburban ring of Washington, D.C. ...
,
Virginia in the
Washington, D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
, suburbs with his wife, the former Margaret "Peggy" Blanchard.
Republican years
During the
Nixon Administration, Phillips headed two
federal agencies, ending his
Executive Branch career as director of the U.S.
Office of Economic Opportunity
The Office of Economic Opportunity was the agency responsible for administering most of the War on Poverty programs created as part of United States President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society legislative agenda. It was established in 1964 as a ...
(OEO) in the
Executive Office of the President for five months in 1973, a position from which he resigned when U.S. President
Richard M. Nixon reneged on his commitment to
veto further funding for
Great Society
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The term was first coined during a 1964 commencement address by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the University ...
programs begun in the administration of Nixon's predecessor,
Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...
.
[Smith, Peter Jesserer (May 6, 2013]
"Catholics Bid Farewell to Pro-Life Lion Howard Phillips"
'' National Catholic Register''. Retrieved 2013-05-06.
Nixon's appointment of Phillips as
Acting
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.
Acting involves a broad ra ...
Director of OEO in January 1973 touched off a national controversy culminating in a court case in the
United States District Court for the District of Columbia (''Williams v. Phillips'', 482 F.2d 669) challenging the legality of Phillips' appointment, since the statute establishing the office did not specifically establish a presidential right to make an interim appointment (one not confirmed by the Senate) under the existing circumstances. The Court ruled (and the
2nd Circuit subsequently affirmed) that the President had no right to make the interim appointment and voided it, declaring his time in it to have been illegal.
Formation of the Conservative Caucus
Phillips left the
Republican Party
Republican Party is a name used by many political parties around the world, though the term most commonly refers to the United States' Republican Party.
Republican Party may also refer to:
Africa
* Republican Party (Liberia)
*Republican Party ...
in 1974 after some two decades of service to the GOP as precinct worker, election warden, campaign manager,
congressional
A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of a ...
aide, Boston municipal Republican chairman, and assistant to the chairman of the
Republican National Committee
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is a U.S. political committee that assists the Republican Party of the United States. It is responsible for developing and promoting the Republican brand and political platform, as well as assisting in fu ...
. In
1970
Events
January
* January 1 – Unix time epoch reached at 00:00:00 UTC.
* January 5 – The 7.1 Tonghai earthquake shakes Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (''Extreme''). Between 10,000 and ...
, he was the Republican nominee for
Massachusetts's 6th congressional district
Massachusetts's 6th congressional district is located in northeastern Massachusetts. It contains most of Essex County, including the North Shore and Cape Ann, as well as part of Middlesex County. It is represented by Seth Moulton, who has rep ...
. In
1978
Events January
* January 1 – Air India Flight 855, a Boeing 747 passenger jet, crashes off the coast of Bombay, killing 213.
* January 5 – Bülent Ecevit, of CHP, forms the new government of Turkey (42nd government).
* January 6 � ...
, Phillips finished fourth in the Democratic
primary for the
U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.
[Weber, Bruce (2013-04-23]
"Howard J. Phillips, Stalwart Conservative, Dies at 72"
'' The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
In 1974, Phillips founded the Conservative Caucus, a nationwide, grass-roots public policy advocacy group.
[Black, Chris (1992-09-25]
"Political activist loses to win Conservative takes defeats in stride in effort to build national antitax party"
''Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
''. Retrieved 2013-05-06. The group opposed the 1978
Panama Canal treaties and the
Jimmy Carter-
Leonid Brezhnev SALT II
The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of ...
treaties in 1979, supported the
Strategic Defense Initiative and major tax reductions during the 1980s, and fought to end Federal subsidies to activist groups under the banner of "defunding the
Left."
In 1982, Phillips joined the political activist
Clymer Wright
Clymer Lewis Wright Jr. (July 24, 1932 – January 24, 2011) was a Texas conservative political activist and journalist. He brought term limits to Houston municipal government and encouraged Ronald Reagan to run for president.
Personal life
A ...
of
Houston, Texas, in an unsuccessful effort to convince U.S. President
Ronald W. Reagan to dismiss Houston
attorney James A. Baker, III
James Addison Baker III (born April 28, 1930) is an American attorney, diplomat and statesman. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 10th White House Chief of Staff and 67th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President ...
, from the position of presidential chief of staff. Phillips and Wright claimed that Baker, a former Democrat and a political intimate of then
Vice President
A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on ...
George H. W. Bush, was undercutting conservative initiatives in the Reagan administration. Reagan rejected the Wright-Phillips request, and in 1985, named Baker as
United States Secretary of the Treasury, at Baker's request in a job-swap with then Secretary
Donald T. Regan, a former
Merrill Lynch officer who became chief of staff. Reagan also rebuked Phillips and Wright for waging a "campaign of sabotage" against Baker.
The fight against Baker was not Phillips' first clash with Reagan. The year before in 1981, he had joined other conservatives, including the Reverend
Jerry Falwell, in opposing the nomination of
Sandra Day O'Connor to the
United States Supreme Court. According to Phillips, "People say you can't tell how a Supreme Court nominee will turn out once on the bench. I respectfully disagree. In most cases, it's very clear. I opposed the nomination of Sandra Day O'Connor because it was very clear that she had a pro-abortion record in the
Arizona State Senate
The Arizona State Senate is part of the Arizona Legislature, the state legislature of the US state of Arizona. The Senate consists of 30 members each representing an average of 219,859 constituents (2009 figures). Members serve two-year terms w ...
and as a judge in
Arizona. She was also allied with
Planned Parenthood
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA), or simply Planned Parenthood, is a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care in the United States and globally. It is a tax-exempt corporation under Internal Reven ...
."
[ Flynn, Dan ] In 1990, Phillips opposed the first President Bush's nomination of
David Souter of
New Hampshire to the high court.
Phillips said that he opposed Souter because "I read his senior thesis at Harvard in which he said he was a
legal positivist and one of his heroes was
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist and legal scholar who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932.Holmes was Acting Chief Justice of the Un ...
, and that he rejected all higher law theories, such as those spelled out in our
Declaration of Independence. In addition, he was a trustee of two hospitals: Dartmouth Hitchcock and Concord Memorial. He successfully changed the policy of those two hospitals from zero abortion to convenience abortion."
[
Other Conservative Caucus campaigns have involved opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization, support for a national version of California's ]Proposition 187
California Proposition 187 (also known as the ''Save Our State'' (SOS) initiative) was a 1994 ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit illegal immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public ed ...
(to end mandated subsidies for illegal aliens
Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country or the continued residence without the legal right to live in that country. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upwar ...
), as well as continuing efforts to oppose publicly funded health care, abortion
Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus. An abortion that occurs without intervention is known as a miscarriage or "spontaneous abortion"; these occur in approximately 30% to 40% of pregnan ...
and gay rights
Rights affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people vary greatly by country or jurisdiction—encompassing everything from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage to the death penalty for homosexuality.
Notably, , ...
. Phillips was the host of '' Conservative Roundtable'', a weekly public affairs television program.
Role in formation of the New Right
Phillips played an instrumental role in the leadership of the New Right
New Right is a term for various right-wing political groups or policies in different countries during different periods. One prominent usage was to describe the emergence of certain Eastern European parties after the collapse of the Soviet Uni ...
, and in the founding of the religious right in the 1970s. He worked with fellow conservatives Paul Weyrich of The Heritage Foundation and both former Christian Voice co-activists Richard Viguerie
Richard Art Viguerie (; born September 23, 1933) is an American conservative figure, pioneer of political direct mail and writer on politics. He is the current chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
Life and career
Viguerie was born in Golden Acres ...
and Terry Dolan to persuade the Reverend Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority
Moral Majority was an American political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role ...
, and helped Judie Brown
Judith A. Brown is the president and cofounder of American Life League, the oldest Catholic grassroots anti-abortion organization in the United States.
Early life and education
Brown was born in Los Angeles, California on March 4, 1944. Her fat ...
form the American Life League
American Life League, Inc. (ALL) is an American Catholic activist organization which opposes abortion, all forms of contraception, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia. Its current president is co-founder Judie Brown and its headquarters is ...
.
Later, Phillips continued to support the New Right by helping found the Council for National Policy
The Council for National Policy (CNP) is an umbrella organization and networking group for conservative and Republican activists in the United States. It was launched in 1981 during the Reagan administration by Tim LaHaye and the Christian rig ...
with Dr. Tim LaHaye.
U.S. Taxpayers Party/Constitution Party
Phillips was one of the founders of the U.S. Taxpayers Party (which changed its name to the Constitution Party in 1999), a third party
Third party may refer to:
Business
* Third-party source, a supplier company not owned by the buyer or seller
* Third-party beneficiary, a person who could sue on a contract, despite not being an active party
* Third-party insurance, such as a V ...
associated with conservative, pro-life
Anti-abortion movements, also self-styled as pro-life or abolitionist movements, are involved in the abortion debate advocating against the practice of abortion and its legality. Many anti-abortion movements began as countermovements in respons ...
issues, and constitutional
A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed.
When these princi ...
government ideas on both social and fiscal issues. He was that party's presidential candidate in the 1992
File:1992 Events Collage V1.png, From left, clockwise: 1992 Los Angeles riots, Riots break out across Los Angeles, California after the Police brutality, police beating of Rodney King; El Al Flight 1862 crashes into a residential apartment buildi ...
, 1996
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A Centennial Olympic Park bombing, bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical Anti-abortion violence, anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 8 ...
and 2000
File:2000 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Protests against Bush v. Gore after the 2000 United States presidential election; Heads of state meet for the Millennium Summit; The International Space Station in its infant form as seen from S ...
elections for U.S. president.
Presidential campaigns
Phillips first campaigned for president in 1992
File:1992 Events Collage V1.png, From left, clockwise: 1992 Los Angeles riots, Riots break out across Los Angeles, California after the Police brutality, police beating of Rodney King; El Al Flight 1862 crashes into a residential apartment buildi ...
, as an independent. He refused to support the re-election of Republican George H. W. Bush or Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. He finished in seventh place in the popular vote. The campaign received 43,369 votes for 0.04% of the total vote.
Phillips was chosen by an overwhelming majority of delegates at the National Convention of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, in San Diego, California, on August 17, 1996, to serve as its presidential candidate in the 1996 election. Phillips finished sixth, with 184,656 votes, for 0.19% of the total vote.
In the 2000 U.S presidential election, Phillips received 98,020 votes for 0.1% of the total vote and a sixth-place finish.
Death
Phillips died at his home in Vienna, Virginia, on April 20, 2013, at the age of 72 after a battle with frontotemporal dementia
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), or frontotemporal degeneration disease, or frontotemporal neurocognitive disorder, encompasses several types of dementia involving the progressive degeneration of frontal and temporal lobes. FTDs broadly present a ...
and Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As ...
. A private service was held on April 29, 2013 with Chuck Baldwin
Charles Obadiah Baldwin (born May 3, 1952) is an American right-wing politician, radio host, and founder-former pastor of Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida. As of January 2011 he was pastor of Liberty Fellowship in Kalispell, Montana ...
, the 2008
File:2008 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Lehman Brothers went bankrupt following the Subprime mortgage crisis; Cyclone Nargis killed more than 138,000 in Myanmar; A scene from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing; ...
Constitution Party presidential nominee, officiating.
Writings
* ''The New Right at Harvard'' (1983)
* ''Moscow's Challenge to U.S. Vital Interests in Sub-Saharan Africa'' (1987)
* ''The Next Four Years'' (1992)
* ''Judicial Tyranny: The New Kings of America?'' (Amerisearch, 2005) – ''contributing author''
See also
References
External links
Howard Phillips' Blog
*
Official Website of The Conservative Caucus
founded by oPhillips.
of '' Conservative Roundtable''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Phillips, Howard
1941 births
2013 deaths
20th-century American politicians
20th-century far-right politicians in the United States
American Independent Party presidential nominees
College Republicans
Constitution Party (United States) presidential nominees
Virginia Constitutionalists
Converts to Evangelicalism from Judaism
Deaths from Alzheimer's disease
Deaths from dementia in Virginia
Deaths from frontotemporal dementia
Harvard College alumni
Jewish American candidates for President of the United States
Massachusetts Democrats
Massachusetts Republicans
New Right (United States)
People from Vienna, Virginia
Politicians from Boston
Candidates in the 1992 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 1996 United States presidential election
Candidates in the 2000 United States presidential election
Virginia Democrats
American political party founders
21st-century American Jews