While Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is in Florida Monday addressing a terrorism law enforcement conference in Miami, Senate Democrats in Washington, D.C., are forcing a vote by their Republican colleagues on a resolution expressing no confidence in America's top law-enforcement official. The resolution itself is only one sentence: "It is the sense of the Senate that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales no longer holds the confidence of the Senate and of the American people."
No one is predicting that a symbolic resolution expressing no confidence in Gonzales will survive even the test vote Monday. Most Republicans are likely to vote no, dismissing the whole exercise as a ploy to embarrass President Bush.
"I'm not going to comment on the kind of job" Gonzales has done, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition." "The vote is whether we should take a vote to express a lack of confidence by the Senate. That's wrong."
At the same time, not many of the Senate's 100 members have been supportive of Gonzales after the attorney general told a Senate committee dozens of times that he could not recall key details about the firing of eight federal prosecutors.
White House spokesman Tony Snow brushed off the impending vote.
"There's an attempt to sort of pull this thing like a piece of taffy and looking if there's any political advantage in it. There's not," Snow said on "Fox News Sunday."
Democrats say it's only right for senators to go on record, since five Republicans have called outright for Gonzales' dismissal and many more of the president's party have said in public comments that they have lost confidence in him.