More Bad News for AG Gonzales

When your president's political allies complain, then you know it's probably time to go. From Time Magazine:

In what could prove an embarrassing new setback for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of influential conservatives and longtime Bush supporters has written a letter to the White House to call for his resignation.

Here's the text of the letter:

Dear Mr. President and Attorney General:

We, the undersigned co-founders of the American Freedom Agenda, urge the Attorney General to submit his resignation and the President to accept.

Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances.

He has brought the rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm.

He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice.

He has embraced legal theories that could be employed by a successor to obliterate the conservative philosophy of individual liberty and limited government celebrated by the Founding Fathers.

In sum, Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country.

The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor, who will keep the law, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

The letter is then signed by a group of prominent conservatives including (according to Time):

Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Reagan Justice Department, who has worked frequently with current Administration and the Republican National Committee to promote Bush's court nominees; David Keene, chairman of the influential American Conservative Union, one of the nation's oldest and largest grassroots conservative groups; Richard Viguerie, a well-known G.O.P. direct mail expert and fundraiser; and Bob Barr, the former Republican Congressman from Georgia and free speech advocate, as well as John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative non-profit active in fighting for what it calls religious freedoms.

Anyone want to start up a "Gonzales Resigns" pool?