Despite deep misgivings in both parties about his performance, Mr. Gonzales has refused to resign, and President Bush has continued to back him.  Party head-counters had predicted that they would come close this afternoon, with one or more Republicans joining most Democrats, but that they would not reach the 60-vote threshold.  In recent months, Mr. Gonzales has been embroiled in controversy over the firings of federal prosecutors, and by more recent disclosures that partisan considerations had guided the filling of lower-level nonpolitical jobs at the Justice Department.  Even though Mr. Gonzales and President Bush appeared to be succeeding in warding off the no-confidence resolution, the spectacle of the Attorney General’s shortcomings being openly debated on the Senate floor was painfully embarrassing for the White House and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill.  Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, derided the nonbinding resolution as a “misguided and inappropriate” assault on the separation of powers spelled out in the Constitution. The attorney general does not need the “confidence” of the Senate to hold his post, Mr. Hatch said.  Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a member of the judiciary panel, countered that the attorney general’s office under Mr. Gonzales had become “an extension of the White House,” and that Mr. Gonzales should resign.  An attorney general must be “an independent leader with an unyielding commitment to the law,” Senator Feinstein said, but Mr. Gonzales had “not lived up to this standard.”  Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, another former chairman of the judiciary committee and now its ranking Republican, said he would vote in favor of the resolution, even though “the Senate has a lot more important things to do.”  “The department at the present time is in shambles,” Mr. Specter said.  Current and former Justice Department officials have complained that the agency is dispirited and drifting under Mr. Gonzales, whose standing and credibility have badly eroded in Congress and within the agency, hastened by his admissions in congressional testimony that he was only marginally involved in the firings and could not recall many pertinent details.  Moreover, Mr. Gonzales’ position seemed to slip further after gripping testimony last month by a former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey. Mr. Comey described an incident in March 2004, when Mr. Gonzales was White House counsel and John Ashcroft, Mr. Gonzales’s predecessor as Attorney General, was hospitalized with pancreatitis.  In response to a legal analysis by the department declaring that a warrantless eavesdropping program authorized by the president was unlawful, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, went to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get his authorization to continue the program even though he had just undergone gall bladder surgery. Mr. Ashcroft refused.  Mr. Specter was the only Republican senator to declare beforehand that he would back the resolution. He has criticized the Justice Department for months as dysfunctional and rudderless under Mr. Gonzales.  “Do I have confidence in Attorney General Gonzales? The answer is a resounding no,” Mr. Specter said during a news conference in Philadelphia that previewed his remarks on the Senate floor. “I’m going to vote that I have no confidence in Attorney General Gonzales.”  Other Republicans who voted to end debate and move to the no-confidence resolution itself were Senators John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Gordon Smith of Oregon, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both of Maine. (Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent and former Democrat from Connecticut, voted “no.”)  But other Republicans said that they viewed the resolution as a partisan effort by Democrats aimed at undercutting Mr. Bush, who repeated his support for Mr. Gonzales at a news conference today in Sofia, Bulgaria, as he prepared to return to Washington.  “They can have their votes of no confidence, but it’s not going to make the determination about who serves in my government,” Mr. Bush said. “This process has been drug out a long time. It’s political.”  It was not clear where Democrats would turn next in pushing for Mr. Gonzales’s ouster. The investigation into the firings of the United States Attorneys appears to nearing an end, with an appearance by the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, before the House Judiciary Committee likely later this month.  The Senate-led effort to compel the testimony of Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, about their role in the dismissals has been stalled by disagreements between White House and the Senate judiciary panel. So far, the committee has authorized but has not issued subpoenas to force their appearance.  The events culminating in the vote today have been building since January, when Democrats learned that eight United States Attorneys had been forced from their jobs without being given a reason.  In response to Senate and House inquiries, the Justice Department offered differing explanations, at first asserting that the prosecutors had been dismissed for performance failings and that the White House had played only a minor role.  Later, Justice Department officials acknowledged that most of the fired prosecutors had received highly favorable performance evaluations, and that the White House had initiated their dismissal after the 2004 elections.
Although they fell short of the 60 votes needed to bring the no-confidence resolution to a vote,  Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s critics mustered a majority with some Republican support.