Pressure mounted on the United States Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, to resign on Tuesday in spite of a phone call from President George Bush to reassure him his job was safe.
The Democratic-led Congress, capitalising on what it sees as Bush’s vulnerability in his last two years in office, stepped up its campaign to claim Gonzales’s scalp in a row over alleged political interference in the legal system.
The row centres on the Bush administration’s firing last year of eight federal prosecutors. The White House claims the sackings were mainly on grounds of competence. Democrats in Congress say they were fired for political reasons, failing to pursue enthusiastically enough alleged Democratic election abuses.
In a statement from the White House on Tuesday night, Bush said of the Attorney General: ”He’s got support with me.”
The president threatened confrontation with the Democrats when he refused to allow White House officials, including Karl Rove, to testify in public before a congressional committee looking into the sackings.
Bush said he would only allow private testimony to be given and fight any attempt at subpoenas. ”We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honourable public servants.”
Loss of support
In a sign of Gonzales’s loss of support among Republicans as well as Democrats, the senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to end the Bush administration’s power to appoint prosecutors on its own. The Senate passed a Bill by 94 to two that overturned a provision in the Patriot Act that gave Bush the power.
The row comes in a month in which Bush has been weakened by further falls in his public approval ratings. After six years in which he enjoyed the relative support of a Republican-dominated Congress, since January he has faced an increasingly hostile Democratic-led House of Representatives and Senate.
Having lost the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in November, Bush is resisting sacrificing another member of his team. The White House Deputy Press Secretary, Dana Perino, denied press reports that the administration was already looking at potential successors to Gonzales.
She said: ”The president reaffirmed his strong backing of the Attorney General and his support for him. The president called him to reaffirm his support.”
Controversial figure
Gonzales has been a controversial figure since before taking office in 2004. As White House counsel in 2002, he wrote a memo in which he argued that torture could be allowed in certain circumstances, in relation to Guantánamo Bay inmates.
If Gonzales was under attack from only Democrats, his chances of survival would be higher. But support has been slow to come from Republican congressmen. Two senior Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee, Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch, have failed to come to his rescue.
Other Republicans have called for his dismissal, describing him as a liability after a number of rows, including one last month in which the Justice Department was criticised for abusing phone tapping and other infringements of personal freedom as part of the ”war on terror”.
Gonzales’s position was undermined last week when emails were disclosed that appeared to support the Democratic case that the firing of the attorneys had been political. The Justice Department published a further 3 000 pages revealing concern that the dismissals of the eight might not stand up to scrutiny.
Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairperson of the Senate judiciary committee, who has been leading the campaign for dismissal, said on Tuesday: ”If you politicise the prosecutors, you politicise everybody in the whole chain of law enforcement.” — Guardian Unlimited Â