Sam Ervin (right), as chair of the Senate Watergate Committee. Ervin gained lasting fame through his stewardship of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices, also known as the Senate Watergate Committee, from the 1972 presidential election.
Ervin said he would seek approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee and that he would carry the fight to the Senate floor in the event that the committee rejected his legislation. Ervin was also a staunch opponent of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which abolished nationality quotas beginning in 1968.
In 1966, Senator Ervin played a major role in the defeat of Senator Everett Dirksen 's Constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools. Ervin also favored the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment, which made illegally seized evidence inadmissible in criminal trials.
Ervin referred to the administration's bill as cockeyed and unconstitutional and that his version would provide for federal registers being appointed in areas certified to having finds of racial discrimination as defined under the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In 1956, Senator Ervin helped organize resistance to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision calling for desegregation of schools by drafting The Southern Manifesto; this influential document encouraged defiance of desegregation and was signed by all but a few of the Southern members of Congress.
Buckley 's Firing Line program, Ervin suggested that people in public life need to have more "backbone", and Buckley playfully suggested Gordon Liddy as a model to which Ervin responded, "Well, Gordon Liddy has a little too much backbone.
Slow Burn (2020 series) v. t. e. Samuel James Ervin Jr. (September 27, 1896 – April 23, 1985) was an American politician. A Democrat, he served as a U.S. Senator from North Carolina from 1954 to 1974. A native of Morganton, he liked to call himself a " country lawyer ", and often told humorous stories in his Southern drawl.