service date. It also exposes them to the risk of an additional or prolonged combat deployment. For opponents, "involuntary extension" is contrary to the notion of voluntary service and undermines popular support for the conflict. In a campaign speech in 2004, then-presidential candidate John Kerry described stop-loss as a "backdoor draft." The use of stop-loss has been criticized by activists and some politicians as an abuse of the spirit of the law, on the basis that Congress has not formally declared war. During August 2007, Iraq Veterans Against the War, an activist organization of former and current service members, announced a national "Stop the Stop-Loss" campaign at a press conference where they were holding a week-long vigil in a tower erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Other anti stop-loss vigils occurred in Bellingham, Washington, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. On March 10 and 11, 2008, a group of college students from the organization Our Spring Break, supported by Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, as well as several other organizations, issued symbolic stop-loss "orders" to every member of both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate in protest of both the practice of stop-lossing, and of the Iraq War. On March 12, 2008, the students "enforced" the orders by blocking off the exits to the parking garages of the Rayburn House Office Building and the Hart Senate Office Building. Legal challenges The first known legal challenge to the involuntary extension of a soldier's enlistment contract occurred during the American Civil War, when Private Edward A. Stevens filed suit against the federal government for extending his three-month enlistment. The prosecuting party for the government was Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War. Stevens lost the suit and was confined for "mutinous conduct" for a brief period of time. Apparently the first time a court decision mentioned the Pentagon's stop-loss policy was a 1991 decision in the case of Craig L. Sherman. Sherman was a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force under an enlistment contract that explicitly limited his active duty service to four years. But, in 1990, at the commencement of Operation Desert Storm, President George H.W. Bush issued Executive Order 12722, declaring a national emergency, and Executive Order 12728, which delegated to the Secretary of Defense, who could redelegate further, the President's authority under 10 U.S.C. § 673c, authorizing the President to suspend any provision