Democrats to seek vote on Gonzales

Senior Senate Democrats yesterday vowed to stage a no-confidence vote on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, dealing a fresh blow to a Justice Department rocked by scandal and quickly losing credibility with Congress.

In another sign that President Bush’s recent show of support for Gonzales has not abated lawmakers’ bipartisan frustration, Sen. Norm Coleman (Minn.) yesterday became the sixth Republican senator to call for the attorney general’s resignation.

{mosads}Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) led the no-confidence push, first floated last month but made official, the senators said, in light of two new revelations this week. First, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey stunned the Hill on Tuesday by revealing Gonzales’ 2004 visit to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital bed to pressure Ashcroft for his approval of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

Coleman told the Associated Press that the Comey narrative helped push him into the lineup of lawmakers urging Gonzales to step down, just as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) did hours after Comey addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We need an Attorney General who is a prosecutor, not a puppet,” Schumer said in a statement. “A vote of no confidence will express that sentiment and send a powerful message to the White House that Congress does have a stake in these matters.”

The second new revelation, reported by The Washington Post yesterday, found that as many as 26 U.S. attorneys were on the firing line at the beginning of a two-year housecleaning of federal prosecutors. That process has erupted in scandal as Justice and the White House battle with Democratic investigators.

But as Feinstein pointed out, the attorneys flap is only one of multiple evolving storylines driving Democrats to call for Gonzales’ ouster. Prisoner interrogations that Gonzales approved while he served as White House counsel, the wiretapping program and Gonzales’ less-than-candid testimony before Congress are all playing a role.

“Whether it was the torture memo, whether it’s Guantanamo [Bay], whether it’s Geneva Convention, whether it’s U.S. attorneys, whether it’s: ‘I don’t know, I don’t recall,’ I have a significant loss of confidence in Attorney General Gonzales,” Feinstein said in a statement.

Democrats’ last no-confidence drive, against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was scuttled by then-majority Republicans in September 2006. But control of the chamber, and Republican ire at Gonzales, should ensure a different outcome this time.

Schumer told reporters that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signed off on the no-confidence push, as Reid did on the Rumsfeld move. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is also expected to sign on.

The no-confidence motion would be nonbinding but would pile even more political pressure on Gonzales, who this week attempted to lay blame for the attorney firings at the feet of his departing deputy, Paul McNulty. Coleman and Hagel, along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), John Sununu (R-N.H.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), would be hard-pressed to explain a vote against the motion after previously urging Gonzales to resign.

Liberal-leaning People for the American Way (PFAW), which launched a petition drive against Gonzales in the early days of the attorney scandal, hailed Schumer and Feinstein’s move in a statement.

“All members of Congress who support the Constitution and equal justice under law, without exception, should support a resolution of no confidence,” PFAW President Ralph Neas said.