Longtime conservative activist Howard Phillips died Saturday. As Ralph Z. Hallow notes in his Washington Times obituary:

During his 72 years, he went from being a Harvard-educated, unsuccessful Jewish Democratic candidate for public office to an evangelical Protestant Republican who founded the Conservative Caucus and led a decades-long crusade to end the government funding of the left that was taking place under GOP and Democratic administrations alike.

That, in turn, prompted him to found the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1991, which became the Constitution Party in 2000—and Phillips was its nominee in each presidential contest over those years. In 2004, he contributed to TAC‘s election symposium, urging support for that year’s CP candidate, Michael Peroutka. He wrote, “If conservatives don’t vote for what they believe, they will never get what they want. Losing as slowly as possible means we still lose. Going over the cliff at a supposedly slower speed still means we are going to crash.” Many on the right could agree with that, even if they didn’t accept Phillips’s understanding of what he called America’s “Biblical common-law foundations.”

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