Washington – Support for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sank further Thursday as Democrats proposed a no- confidence vote, a fifth GOP senator called for his resignation and yet another Republican predicted he won’t survive a congressional investigation.
The White House shrugged off the no-confidence idea as merely symbolic, and President Bush continued to stand by his embattled friend.
Democrats proposed two versions of a nonbinding resolution expressing what senators of both parties have said for weeks: Gonzales has become too weakened to run the Justice Department.
One version lumps Gonzales in with another scandal-tarred ally, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz.
“Be it the World Bank or the Department of Justice, the way to maintain the integrity of an institution is to have leaders of integrity at the top,” said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. “The time has come to move beyond these leaders.”
The World Bank announced Wolfowitz’s resignation later Thursday.
Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California focused their resolution on Gonzales.
“It seems the only person who has confidence in the attorney general is President Bush,” Schumer told reporters. “The president long ago should have asked the attorney general to step down.”
“A ‘no-confidence’ vote is nothing more than a meaningless political act,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. “The attorney general has the full confidence of the president.”
For all of the administration’s defense, several GOP officials acknowledged privately that Republicans were still reeling from testimony that Gonzales, when he was Bush’s White House counsel, pressured Attorney General John Ashcroft to certify the legality of Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program while Ashcroft lay in intensive care.
Asked twice during a news conference Thursday if he personally ordered Gonzales to Ashcroft’s hospital room, Bush refused to answer.
“There’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen. I’m not going to talk about it,” Bush said.
Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota on Thursday became the fifth Republican senator to demand that Gonzales leave.
“I would hope that the attorney general understands that the department is suffering right now,” Coleman told reporters on a conference call.
And Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., suggested Thursday that Bush consider ejecting Gonzales.
Meanwhile, Sen. Arlen Specter, the Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, said the Justice Department cannot properly oversee Bush’s eavesdropping program with Gonzales at the helm of the agency.
