With Attorney General Alberto Gonzales vowing to remain in his job and President Bush standing by him, Senate Democratic leaders are seriously considering bringing a resolution to the floor expressing no confidence in Gonzales, according to a senior leadership source.
“I don’t think [Gonzales] can survive, no matter what the president says,” said the source. The vote would be nonbinding and have no substantive impact, but it would force all Republican Senators into the politically uncomfortable position of saying publicly whether they continue to support Gonzales in the wake of the scandal surrounding the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Democratic leaders have not yet set an exact time frame for when they would bring such a resolution to the floor.
The idea of a no confidence vote is expected to be discussed at today’s Senate Democratic luncheon.
There’s a lot of frustration that the Democrats, now in control of the House and [barely] the Senate are getting so stonewalled by the Administration. Some question their not being up to the task of putting the skids of the erosion of America by the Bush machine. My take is different. I think they’re doing a stellar job. The difficulties are two-fold: First, Bush. Cheney, and Rove have had six years to build their fortress. They’ve seeded every agency with partisan operatives as we learned this afternoon with the Office of Special Counsel. Second, there are still a lot of Americans who, even though they may now be awake about the worst of things [The Iraq War], they are still in denial about how corrupt the government has become. Virtually every agency that’s tasked with protecting our rights has been essentially dismantled. The problem is not the resolve of the Democrats. It’s the Republican Fortress that shields the President using federal agencies as partisan arms. The only real choice the Democratic Congress has is to keep hammering until the wall cracks. And it’s going to crack. It’s inevitable…
I sent emails to my senators telling them that Reid is doing the right thing. I just sent the Today show an email after watching Ann Curry interview Laura Bush. The First lady just told Ms Curry that no one hurts more than the President or the First Lady about the loss of life of our soldiers in Iraq. I don’t think the over 3000 families who have lost their loved ones in this war would agree with her on that stupid statement.