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. Phillips publicly and immediately disavowed the Klan.[6] Phillips was also president of Policy Analysis, Inc., a public policy research organization which publishes the bimonthly Issues and Strategy Bulletin.
Nixon's appointment of Phillips as Acting 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.[9]
In 1974, Phillips founded the Conservative Caucus, a nationwide, grass-roots public policy advocacy group.[4][10] The group opposed the 1978 Panama Canal treaties and the Jimmy Carter-Leonid BrezhnevSALT 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."[7]
The fight against Baker was not Phillips' first clash with Reagan. 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 and as a judge in Arizona. She was also allied with Planned Parenthood."[7][11] In 1990, Phillips opposed the first President Bush's nomination of David Souter of New Hampshire to the high court.[7] 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. 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."[11]
Phillips first campaigned for president in 1992, 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.[16]
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.[17]