Top congressional Democrats are calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' resignation.

Recent Senate hearings on the apparent politically motivated firings of eight US attorneys by the Bush administration has dealt a severe blow to the credibility of the administration and to the Justice Department.

This weekend, Sen. Joe Biden (MD), who is a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president, described Gonzales as having 'lost the confidence of the vast majority of the American people' and Congress. Biden argued that Gonzales used his office to fire US attorneys with whom the Bush administration disagreed politically amounted to 'an abuse of power.'

Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) noted that 'there have been lots of problems' with the Justice Department's politicization of hirings and firings. Specter added, that the Senate Judiciary Committee should investigate the Justice Department further.

Judiciary Committee member Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) accused Gonzales of being even more political than former Attorney General John Ashcroft, widely known for his Christian fundamentalist outlook and his often inflammatory and overblown rhetoric about the terrorism cases his department was putting together.

Gonzales, Schumer noted, 'either doesn't accept or doesn't understand that he is no longer just the president's lawyer, but has a higher obligation to the rule of law and the Constitution even when the president should not want it to be so.'

Because he has failed to adhere to this basic principle in the oath of his office, Schumer added that 'this department has been so political' and that 'for the sake of the nation, Attorney General Gonzales should step down.'

Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee has already revealed that a US Attorney from Arkansas was replaced by Tim Griffin, a former aide to senior White House adviser Karl Rove. According to witnesses, White House Counsel Harriet Miers personally asked Attorney General Gonzales to install Griffin.

In fact, Rove may have also been involved in the firings of the other US attorneys as well. According to media accounts, the White House has admitted that Rove handled what amounted to politically motivated complaints of US attorneys.

In the cases of fired US Attorney David C. Iglesias from New Mexico, Rove assured state Republican leaders there that Iglesias would be 'gone' when they lodged politically motivated criticisms of him. Apparently Rove then passed on his feelings about Iglesias to both Gonzales and Miers.

'The more we learn, the more it seems that people at high levels of the White House have been involved in the U.S. attorney purge,” Schumer told McClatchey Newspapers.

Schumer added that the evidence is mounting that Gonzales is not running a politically neutral department, and suggested that in fact Gonzales has used his office to promote the Bush administration and Republican Party agenda.

Pressure on Gonzales and the Justice Department over the politically motivated firings of 8 US attorneys came just as the department's inspector general released a report admitting that the FBI broke or abused US Patriot Act provisions in the process of obtaining personal information from telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, and credit bureaus.

According to the ACLU, the report shows that the FBI's initial attempt to cry human error as an excuse for the abuses simply lacks credibility. The report shows that FBI agents made hundreds of illegal requests to gain access to private information and then sought to cover up their attempts.

Even further, the report shows that the FBI made hundreds of thousands of so-called National Security Letter requests – more than supporters of the US PATRIOT Act ever thought it would. According to the report, many of these were authored even when no underlying investigation had been approved.

Urging Congress to repeal portions of the US PATRIOT Act and to protect civil liberties, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero stated, “It seems that every time the American people entrust the Bush administration with some new power, it not only abuses that power but also seizes additional powers without our knowledge.'