Will White House sacrifice Gonzales to save Rove?

Vice President Dick Cheney made only a perfunctory defense of Gonzales during an appearance Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. While declaring that he and Bush still had confidence in the attorney general, despite widespread criticism of the politically-motivated firing of eight US attorneys, Cheney sought to distance the White House from the issue.

“This took place inside the Justice Department,” he said. “The one who needs to answer to that and lay out on the record the specifics of what transpired is the attorney general, and he’ll do so.”

The senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, joined with Democrats in suggesting that Gonzales had only an outside chance of retaining his post. Senate Republicans who are closer to the White House, such as Jon Kyl of Arizona, were also noncommittal on the prospect for Gonzales surviving.

A group of conservative lawyers and former Bush and Reagan administration office-holders urged Gonzales to step down, in a statement released Monday. The statement went well beyond the criticisms voiced in the Senate, attacking a range of anti-democratic policies with which Gonzales is identified, declaring that he “has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution’s time-honored checks and balances.”

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