to handle this thing called watergate than senator sam j irvin. i worked for center sam jay irvin for 10 years. and i can personally attest. that things were different then than they are now. civility reigned remember that word civility and all of and all the people who were here some 60 years ago know that that is the case. too much civility is absent today. consider the level of viteral and the political discourse that exists in government today and even in the halls of congress i cannot emphasize enough the importance of the relationship between democratic senator, sam j ervin. and republican howard baker last chairman. okay. welcome to tennessee. they made a pact in the very beginning that this would be a non-person hearing the sole purpose of which was to uncover the truth. it's hard to imagine this happening today. because it required level heads and plain old-fashioned civility. they prove that a congressional committee devoid of malice and political bias. good fulfill expunctional of informing the public and then proposed legislation that w

mean one of the things that we again forget is the urban committee when it begins, it's hearings sam irvin's, you know televised hearings in the summer of 1973 were new that congress had very little history of of oversight hearings and so when they set out to figure out what they they're actually going to do and how to do this. they actually go back to congress's hearing's to investigate the 1861 battle of bull run. i mean, that's how far they have to stretch back to look for analogs of confessional oversights. the must see hearings that you you those are televised that summer for something. 240 hours on national tv in a moment when there were far fewer tv choices, of course, i mean it's the three networks and pbs and the average american household that summer watches nearly 40 hours of televised hearings and which is just a tremendous amount of news consumption to imagine and the whole battle over executive privilege. i mean something that we still see playing out in the papers literally day by day right now begins with richard nixon the that in fact before nixon before watergate the idea o

howard baker worked in tandem with sam irvine to get to the truth. today you have a party that is determined to remain enthralled to donald trump either afraid of crossing him or genuinely believing in him and that is a different environment. so as charles coleman said, there is a couple of audiences here. will they listen and change their mind as a result of what they hear tonight or not and does the audience the justice department does that mean they could be encouraged taking criminal action but i argue there is a third audience and it is history. the jury of history. what i think the committee is trying to do here, even if they don't change public opinions in the short-term, and even if they don't goat merrick garland into taking some sort of action, what they're trying to do here is lay out the facts and so for posterity, we know what happened here and therefore there is a verdict over time in effect that said that what happened here is not what the framers envisioned when they wrote our constitution. >> chief white house correspondent for "the

i would say let's keep our eyes on her, on liz cheney, almost as we kept our eyes on sam irvin, the chairmanrgate committee. but she has another thing going for her, as does the committee. and that is the fact her father was the vice president of the united states, reviled her father by the left, by the democrats. and here she is leading the attack on her own party, which has said, we won't cooperate with this investigation. compare that to the watergate situation where it was republicans who pushed richard nixon out of office. barry goldwater, the great conservative, 1964 nominee of his party. bob woodward and i went to his apartment when we were writing "the final days." goldwater gave himself a big tumbler of whiskey, pulled out his diary from the last days of the nixon white house, read to us how he and the leadership of the senate and the house had gone to nixon and nixon asked, will i convicted in the senate in a trial? goldwater looked at the president and said, mr. president, you have very few votes, and you do not have mine for acquittal. and that next day, richard nixon resigned. t

senator sam irvin our lake colleague from north carolina was fond of reminding all of us and quoting an eloquent educator about the ties between the magna carta the english petition of rights. the declaration of independence in the united states constitution and the quote he used to always use was this. these are great documents of history. cut them and they will bleed bleed with the blood of those who fashioned them and those who nurtured them through the succeeding generations. judge each generation in some sense has had as much to do to author our constitution as the 39 men who have fixed their signatures to it 200 years ago. indeed two years after its signing following a bitter national debate over ratification. at the insistence of the people the constitution was profoundly a nobled by the addition of what have come to be known as the bill of rights. but before a hundred years with transpire. the civil war erupted over the meaning of that constitution and that so-called rights a civil war which would answer lincoln's question? whether quote any nation so conceived and so dedicat

stunning, memorable -- to me, and i think to people watching this realize this is exactly what senator sam irvinergate committee said it's the lust for political power. you can hear it in trump's insistent cadence in his voice of just pushing, pushing. so is this -- somehow is his right or that there is a necessity in him holding power and i think this will be him remembered as trump saying i am going to walk over your grandmother to hold this political power in which he was not entitled to according to the law and the constitution. >> you know, walter isakson, we've been talking in the last couple of days about fascism and how trumpism is fascism. you look at the violent imagery that's used in television ads and watching that over 100 republicans candidates used guns in their ads. we have one of the most extreme version of that, we have members of congress, trumpists who are using imagery that suggests using violence against democratic members of congress. you had the threats that we heard yesterday from the testimony, people who have been threatened with violence because they wouldn't violate

university of california irvine researched an ancient chinese herb that was found to inhibit tolerance. which means it can be used to abate addiction. have you heard about that? sam: i'm afraid i have not heard about it. i am easy to find online. if you want to send me a link to that study, i'm very interested in this kind of stuff, so i apologize for not having heard about that specific study but feel free to look me up and shoot me a link to it. host: cornelius, alexandria, louisiana. go ahead with your question or comment. guest: i'm curious because i've been listening and you are talking about how america has changed. i was a big ross perot patriot and stuff and he said that would be the giant sucking sound because both the democrats and republicans wanted to connect canada, u.s. and mexico. do you think this was the downfall of america? thank you, sam. sam: thanks for the question. it is a great one and you can spend books discussing it and it is a very valid question. i would say free-trade -- like everything in life, is about trade-offs. it's how you respond to those trade-offs that is crucial. we lost many jobs because of that and we also gained many jobs