Gonzales' Greatest Service

One more thing about Gonzales. He won't resign - he might get fired, though I sincerely doubt it, but he'll never resign.

Does anybody think the president wants to nominate another attorney general and let him sit through confirmation hearings by this Senate?

updated to note that I just saw this same notion in Dan Froomkin's Live Chat today, credited to Peter Canellos of the Boston Globe (which I do read online though not yet today. Honest.) Canellos develops the idea in a different - disquieting but credible - vein. I was just thinking about the hearings. Canellos is looking to the nominee - and the White House's needs:

President Bush has an admirable sense of loyalty to his top aides. But the administration's willingness to withstand its own party's disdain for Gonzales probably springs not from loyalty but from self-interest: The last thing the president needs right now is confirmation hearings for a new attorney general.

...

Since so much depends on favorable rulings from Justice, the administration can't possibly look forward to having to justify its actions to a new team of lawyers. But that's almost certain to happen if Gonzales is replaced by someone outside Bush's inner circle. Bush would be very hard-pressed to get an inner-circle appointee confirmed by Democratic-controlled Senate. He or she would have had to withstand days of public grilling by Democratic senators, who would try to raise the curtain on any of the administration's secret programs.

More likely, Bush would be obliged to choose an attorney general with a reputation for independence, such as a former Republican senator with credibility on Capitol Hill. But such a figure would almost certainly be more skeptical of the administration's assertions of executive power than Gonzales, a close Bush associate from the president's Texas days.