I'll add my two cents to all of this. Short version: this has gone on long enough. There are no reasons -- none -- for continuing to keep Alberto Gonzales in his position. No degree of supposed presidential perogative can justify obstruction and incompetence of the level that has been witnessed in the last few months.
Alberto Gonzales' testimony today was, as usual, outrageous. He seemed brow-furrowingly intent on balancing each answer between a thinly veiled lie, gross and wide-ranging job incompetence, and a total disregard for the right of Congress to know the actual answers in the first place. He must be a true pro at it, because he managed to give all three impressions with nearly every answer.
Leahy and other senators pressed Gonzales on both his apparent fabrications and his now-legendary alleged lack of memory of or involvement with any of the actual duties of his position, including the infamous hospital trip to a sedated Ashcroft. His answers were misleading, waffling, and sometimes buffoonish. He contradicted the testimony of his deputies; he contradicted his own previous testimony; he contradicted facts personally known to the members of the committee. He lied, in other words. Repeatedly.
Arlen Specter (R-LastThinRemnantsOfCredibility) has hypothesized that a special prosecutor may at this point be required to investigate the politicization of the Department of Justice. That may very well be a necessary step, but it alone is insufficient. At this point, based on what already is known, Gonzales must resign -- or be removed.
Alberto Gonzales has lost a wide swath of his underlings to scandal already; he himself remains only because he has maintained himself within a fortress of supposed stupefying ignorance as to their actions. His department has unequivocally been politicized, certainly in violation of Department of Justice policies and quite probably in violation of federal law: the prime remaining questions revolve around how it happened and how far into the White House the decisions went, not whether it happened. Under his direction, his department is refusing to cooperate with congressional investigative and oversight efforts into any of the failures and scandals within his department: that in and of itself represents a breach of the public trust that cannot stand. His department has even been blocked from enforcing the will of Congress, by preemptively announcing that the department will not prosecute contempt charges leveled against administration officials refusing to testify about the scandal within his department.
Amidst all of it, the Attorney General sits before a body of the legislative branch and is self-professedly unable to offer any insights or explanations. He cannot explain the workings of his own department, the actions of his own deputies, or the meaning of papers with his own signature on them. He is in the very best case scenario, an incompetent; in the worst, he is a perjurer, an unapologetic political apparatchik, and a corrupter of the laws he has been tasked with upholding.
Mere incompetence is, for any other job in America not directly reporting to a president named Bush, sufficient cause for removal. If Alberto Gonzales does not have the good sense to resign -- now -- then he needs to be removed. Now. There is no possible excuse for his behavior: there is no possible justification for him remaining in the job.
Regardless of what developments may come in the next months, the investigation so far has already revealed an Attorney General who is either incompetent or willfully malicious. He has been given ample opportunities to make his case: he has not just failed, but failed so utterly that his behavior reeks of contempt for his own duties, for investigators, and for Congress.
There will be time for investigations, but in that Alberto Gonzales has demonstrated himself to be acting as an ongoing and unapologetic obstacle to those investigations, the time to remove him is now, not later. The oversight responsibilities of Congress must not be dismantled by either presidential fiat or obstruction by executive branch employees. Gonzales had his last chance to prove cooperation or at least competence today: he failed.