This guy
by Tom Sullivan
NC Republican Senator Richard Burr (l) and NC Democrat, Gov. Roy Cooper.
After Tuesday’s brouhaha inside the Beltway, Rob Christensen at the Raleigh News and Observer recalls how back in the day the Nixon-Watergate hearings in the Senate catapulted conservative NC Sen. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. from relative obscurity to national folk hero. (There were “Senator Sam” T-shirts and buttons.) Although visitors observing the hearings had to be cautioned against making verbal outbursts, it soon became routine for them to greet Ervin’s entrances with applause.
A sample of Ervin’s style from July 18, 1973:
Q. I am just a country lawyer from way down in North Carolina and I probably make inquiries with a little bit more vigor than some of these high faluting city lawyers do. But what I was trying to ascertain is whether or not I could infer from the statements that this tape recording indicates that John Ehrlichman made in this conversation represented an effort on his part to advance the theory that John Dean should be made a scapegoat and sent out into some wilderness, legal wilderness, bearing the full responsibility for any impropriety or unethical aspects of the disuse of the money.
And another:
[Q] How the emotional state or the psychological state of a patient, even if that patient was Ellsberg, could have any relation to national defense or relations to a foreign country is something which eludes the imagination of this country lawyer. Now, Mr. Ehrlichman, I’d like to ask you one question: Why, if the President has this much power, wouldn’t he have had the inherent power to have sent somebody out there with a pistol and have it pointed at the psychiatrist and said, “I’m not gonna commit burglary, I’m just gonna rob you of these records”? Wouldn’t he have had that prerogative, under your theory?
A simple, country lawyer, but a Harvard-educated one.
As Lawrence O’Donnell observed in late March, the Senate seat Democrat Ervin once held is today occupied by Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican. Now chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr may find himself thrust into the limelight as Ervin was.
The Ervin/Watergate analogy gained new resonance this week, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating the Russian ties. Some drew parallels with Nixon’s firing of independent prosecutor Archibald Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, creating a political firestorm.
Burr was not happy with Comey’s ouster, who he has said had been more forthcoming with information than any FBI director he had ever dealt with.
“I am troubled by the timing and reasoning of Director Comey’s termination,” Burr said in a statement. “I have found Director Comey to be a public servant of the highest order, and his dismissal further confuses an already difficult investigation by the Committee.”
Burr has had to fight Democratic skepticism that he would be an Ervin-like bulldog in leading an investigation of Trump and any possible Russian ties.
Perhaps that is because Burr was named to the Trump campaign’s national security advisory council and stood by the candidate even after the infamous groping video appeared. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” as Nixon himself once said.
The ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, expressed confidence in Burr back in March. Still, the current committee seems underpowered for the task with only nine staffers on the investigation and volumes of documents to review and The Democratic Coalition Against Trump alleges Burr is dragging his feet.
Now in his final term in the U.S. Senate, Richard Burr will have to choose whether or not to run interference for his party or to share in some of Sam Ervin’s legacy by walking his shoes. Even if without socks.
Will defending the Constitution and preserving the republic fall to this guy?
I’m not opposed to socks, I just choose not to wear them.https://t.co/VP8Nqjh1E0— Richard Burr (@SenatorBurr) August 23, 2016