What has slowed things down the most are the repeated misstatements by Mr. Gonzales and other officials. Just this week, Bradley Schlozman, a former United States attorney in Missouri who appears to have used his office to help Republicans win elections, wrote to the Senate to say that he had made untrue statements in his testimony last week.
That so many Senate Republicans supported an attorney general that they cannot bring themselves to defend shows that politics is not behind the drive to force him out. It’s behind the insistence that he stay.
The most remarkable thing about the debate on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week was what didn’t happen. Barely a word was said in praise him or his management of the Justice Department. The message was clear even though the Republicans prevented a no-confidence vote through the threat of a filibuster — a tactic that until recently they claimed to abhor. The sound of Mr. Gonzales not being defended was deafening.
The senators who rose to speak in favor of the no-confidence vote made a compelling, and by now well-known, case. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, both former prosecutors, were especially eloquent about the way in which Mr. Gonzales has betrayed the ideals of American law.
The senators who defended Mr. Gonzales clearly did not have their heart in it. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, went off on such a long and belabored attack on Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who has done a commendable job on this matter, that he seemed to think Mr. Schumer, not Mr. Gonzales, was the subject of the resolution.
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