Howard Phillips (politician) - Conservative Caucus

Conservative Caucus

Phillips left the United States Republican Party in 1974 after some two decades of service to the GOP as precinct worker, election warden, campaign manager, congressional aide, Boston municipal Republican chairman, and assistant to the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1978, Phillips finished fourth in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Paul Tsongas won the primary and defeated the incumbent, a liberal African-American Republican, Edward Brooke, in the November general election, who had been first elected in 1966.

The Conservative Caucus, a nonpartisan, nationwide, grass-roots public policy advocacy group, has been in the thick of battles, in opposition to the Panama Canal treaties and the Jimmy Carter-Leonid Brezhnev SALT II treaties in the 1970s, in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and major tax reductions during the 1980s, and in the vanguard of efforts to terminate Federal subsidies to activist groups under the banner of "defunding the Left."

In 1982, Phillips joined the Houston, Texas, political activist Clymer Wright in an unsuccessful effort to convince U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan to dismiss Houston attorney James A. Baker, III, 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 George Herbert Walker Bush, was undercutting conservative initiatives in the Reagan administration. Not only did Reagan reject the Wright-Phillips request, but in 1985, he 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.

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. Phillips is the host of Conservative Roundtable, a weekly public affairs television program.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Phillips coordinated efforts to build private sector support for anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Central America and Southern Africa. He played an instrumental role in the leadership of the New Right, as well as in the founding of the religious right in 1977. Phillips has led fact-finding missions to Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, South America, Central America, Western Europe, and the Far East.