TCC was founded in 1974 by Meldrim Thomson and Howard Phillips. Governor Thomson (R-New Hampshire) was the only sitting governor to support Ronald Reagan for president in 1976. Phillips was one of the founders of William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom, served as student body president at Harvard, and was President Nixon’s acting director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (Democrats refused to confirm his nomination).

Phillips hosted meetings in every U.S. congressional district to recruit and mobilize grassroots activists. In less than two years, there were state coordinators or contacts in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Regional conferences were conducted in Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C. area, and a national gathering of TCC coordinators and activists from almost all states and congressional districts was held in Atlanta.

In 1976, The Conservative Caucus Research, Analysis, and Education Foundation (TCCF), a 501(c)3 entity, was established to supplement the work of TCC. TCCF published the Senate Report analyzing the voting records of all U.S. Senators, along with Congressional Reports in targeted districts.

In 1977, TCC formed a Citizen’s Cabinet – a version of what the British call a Shadow Cabinet – to criticize Carter administration officials. The Citizen’s Cabinet members included former Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt, Congressman (and future Senator) Steve Symms, and Congressman Ron Paul. TCC helped defeat Postcard Voter Registration, taxpayer funding of election campaigns, the nomination of leftist Ted Sorensen to be director of the CIA, and a Ted Kennedy plan for a takeover of healthcare by the federal bureaucracy. TCC’s National Field Director traveled to crucial states, working to defeat a Constitutional amendment which would have given Washington, D.C. two Senators and voting representation in the House.

TCC Chairman Howard Phillips, accompanied by top generals and admirals, visited all 50 states rallying TCC’s membership to help defeat the Jimmy Carter-Leonid Brezhnev SALT II Treaty. Phillips led a fact-finding trip to the Republic of China on Taiwan, accompanied by members of Congress and key conservative leaders. TCC’s documentary, Can Soviet Imperialism Be Halted?, starring top defense and foreign policy experts, was broadcast on TV stations throughout America.

In the fight over the Panama Canal Treaty, TCC led the grassroots opposition, with rallies in all 50 states. It’s widely believed that the fight over the treaty kept Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign alive and positioned him to win in 1980. The mass defeat of treaty supporters in 1978-80 gave Republicans control of the Senate for the first time in 38 years.

One of those new Senators was Gordon Humphrey, TCC’s New Hampshire state coordinator. Humphrey, who had never held office, defeated three-term Senator Thomas McIntyre; he was easily reelected in 1984, and retired in 1990.

TCC helped pass the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, signed into law by President Reagan, which spurred a decade of economic growth. The organization was almost alone in opposing the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Proving TCC correct, Justice O’Connor in 2003 cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion in the case legalizing illegal discrimination when people practicing discrimination claim they’re doing it for “diversity.”)

Chairman Phillips assisted in the founding of Concerned Women for America and of an umbrella group for conservative leaders, the Council for National Policy.

TCC helped win the Cold War. The organization was instrumental in the implementation of the Reagan Doctrine, in which the U.S. provided support for freedom fighters while avoiding direct conflict with the Russians. In that effort, he traveled frequently to southern Africa and led a major delegation to meet with anti-Soviet activists in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. TCC organized the effort for global ballistic missile defense, which became the Strategic Defense Initiative (sometimes called “Star Wars”) and stymied the Soviets. After Congressman Larry McDonald and the other passengers on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 were murdered by the Soviets, TCC organized a memorial service at Constitution Hall in Washington with over 4,000 attendees.

TCC campaigned at the 1984 Republican National Convention in support of a 10 percent flat tax. A TCC-backed tax reform capped federal income taxes at 28 percent for a time.

TCC worked to expose the corruption and extremism of the taxpayer-funded Legal Services Corporation, which was chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

TCC campaigned successfully against ratification of the U.N. Genocide Treaty (which was not actually about preventing genocide), helped push Congress to approve the MX Missile and repeal an amendment blocking aid to freedom fighters, and exposed collusion between Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship, the Chevron oil company, and Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker. Backed by TCC, President Reagan agreed to end compliance with an arms agreement which was beneficial to the Soviet Union, and TCC Chairman Howard Phillips and White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan helped draft President Reagan’s veto message concerning sanctions on South Africa. TCC helped lead the fight against ratification of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, claiming that the Soviet Union would violate the treaty – which, as was later discovered, it did. (Eventually, the U.S, under President Trump, would abrogate the treaty.)

With TCC support, Jesse Helms became the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, aided by his chief of staff, TCC Treasurer Dr. James P. Lucier.

Together with Congressman Jack Kemp, TCC led an official Congressional Delegation to Central America for meetings with key officials in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica during the attempted Soviet takeover of Central America.

TCC also pushed for confirmation of William Rehnquist and Antonio Scalia to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was part of the unsuccessful effort to confirm Robert Bork. TCC was the only conservative organization opposed to the nomination of David Souter – and was proven correct when Justice Souter often joined the Court’s leftwing bloc. With strong TCC support, Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Court.

TCC campaigned successfully against the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, and helped block D.C. statehood. The Caucus successfully fought the nomination of Caldwell Butler as chairman of the Legal Services Corporation, and campaigned successfully for a 30 percent cut in the LSC budget. TCC’s Defund the Left campaign successfully pressured the U.S. General Accounting Office to investigate federal grants to extreme leftist organizations.

Toward the end of the Cold War, TCC worked to put pressure on the Soviets. Chairman Phillips led a Baltic Liberation Tour, bringing American anti-Communists to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland. While in Europe, the TCC-sponsored group met with Vaclav Klaus, a free market anti-Communist leader in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic who would later become president of Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic.

In the Clinton years, TCC launched a campaign for an impeachment inquiry of the Clintons’ massive corruption, challenged the administration’s transfer of critical technology to Communist China, and helped stop automatic pay raises for Congress. TCC’s campaign against HillaryCare helped upend U.S. politics, playing a key role in overthrowing the Left’s control of Congress. For the first time in 40 years, Republicans won the House.

TCC helped block confirmation of Anthony Lake to head the CIA, pushed successfully for withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, organized a delegation that traveled to Panama to protest the turnover of the Panama Canal, and helped secure House passage of a bill repealing a Clinton tax increase that was targeted at senior citizens.

Chairman Phillips led a delegation to Taiwan, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing that met with journalists, diplomats, military personnel, and political leaders, including Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-Jeou, who later became President of Taiwan. Backed by TCC, President George W. Bush removed the U.S. signature from the International Criminal Court Treaty, preventing corrupt U.N. officials from hauling American citizens into a kangaroo court. TCC led the fight against the “Continuity of Government” Project, which would have led, in a crisis, to the selection of members of Congress by appointment rather than election. The Caucus pushed successfully against the Social Security Totalization Agreement with Mexico giving U.S. Social Security benefits to illegal aliens, and TCC’s Secure Borders Coalition was instrumental in blocking illegal-alien amnesty.

TCC created the Coalition to Block the North American Union, chaired by Howard Phillips, who held news conferences on the border-weakening NAU in Ottawa and New Orleans during Mexico/Canada/U.S. summit meetings. The Caucus fought against the Law of the Sea Treaty, against the return of the Fairness Doctrine (which would have killed conservative talk radio), against the renewed push for illegal alien amnesty, and in favor of the repeal of the death tax, and opposed the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Caucus campaigned successfully for House repeal of ObamaCare, which unfortunately failed in the Senate, and for a House bill defunding ObamaCare, Planned Parenthood, and National Public Radio.

Recently, TCC opposed the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, campaigned for Parental Rights and against racist Critical Race Theory, and pushed for the protection of honest elections. The Caucus took its “Thank You Trump” project on the road, gathering the signatures of tens of thousands of Americans. TCC is working for the enactment of term limits for members of Congress.

TCC’s Independent Campaign to Defeat the Biden Senate targets key races in such states as Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.