Howard Phillips (activist)

[5] A 1962 graduate of Harvard College in Cambridge, 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.

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.

[4][11] The group opposed the 1978 Panama Canal treaties and the Jimmy Carter-Leonid Brezhnev SALT II 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 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.

[8] 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., and that he rejected all higher law theories, such as those spelled out in our Declaration of Independence.

"[12] 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 (to end mandated subsidies for illegal aliens), as well as continuing efforts to oppose publicly funded health care, abortion and gay rights.

[8] He worked with fellow conservatives Paul Weyrich of The Heritage Foundation and both former Christian Voice co-activists Richard Viguerie and Terry Dolan to persuade the Reverend Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority, and helped Judie Brown form the American Life League.

[18] 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.

[20] Phillips died at his home in Vienna, Virginia, on April 20, 2013, at the age of 72 after a battle with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.