The Daily Background

The Senate may deal a PR death blow to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the coming days, according to a new report.

The subscription-only Capitol Hill publication Roll Call reports that Senate Democrats are considering holding a nonbinding “no confidence” vote to delcare the Senate’s loss of trust in the Attorney General. According to an excerpt supplied by Daily Kos:

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.

Roll Call’s website has posted this as a “breaking news” item. As such, the full item is not available on Lexis Nexis, and therefore I am not able to quote it at any more length or offer much more insight except to say that I think this would be an awesome idea and a good way of amping the pressure up on Gonzales to resign (because Bush sure as hell isn’t going to fire his old buddy at this point).

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