Senate drops "no confidence" vote on top Bush official

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In the meantime, the Senate debated the no-confidence proposal but fell short by 53-38 on a procedural vote. It needed 60 votes to close debate and move to a vote on the issue itself.

At issue in the scandal is whether Gonzales allowed Republican political meddling in the firing of the prosecutors. The Bush administration has justified the firings, saying the prosecutors were not performing their jobs up to standard.

Gonzales has changed explanations of the firings, initially saying he knew few details.

But some of his underlings have testified to Congress that Gonzales had been working for two years on the firing in collaboration with the White House.

Some of the prosecutors say they were fired because they refused to cave in to political pressure to prosecute certain cases. The scandal has already spawned three justice department resignations, including the second in command.

Bush, on a visit to Sofia, Bulgaria, dismissed the planned vote as "meaningless" and "political" and said it would have "no bearing on whether he serves in office or not."

Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in January in a sweeping rejection by American voters of Bush and the war in Iraq. But Republican senators joined with Democrats in charging that Gonzales has allowed political machinations to undermine the rule of law, a cornerstone of US democracy.

Senator Arlen Specter, one of seven Republicans who voted with the Democrats, referred to a key sick bed incident that had turned him and many other fellow Republicans against Gonzales.

As White House counsel, Gonzales was a key architect of controversial legal approaches by the Bush administration, including questionable surveillance programmes and the legal constructs used to justify harsh interrogation techniques bordering on torture.

The constitutionality of the programmes provoked heated dissent within the Department of Justice. Gonzales moved to quash the resistance by leading a top level delegation to the hospital room of then-attorney general John Ashcroft who was very ill to get him to pronounce the programmes constitutional.

Ashcroft threatened to resign because of what Gonzales tried to do, only to later be replaced by Gonzales himself.

"He urged an ill John Ashcroft to sign a statement that his justice department itself thought was not justified ... and he's still attorney general?" asked another senator during the debate.

There are more than 90 US federal prosecutors, heading regional offices that conduct criminal investigations. But they have traditionally been replaced at the start of a president's term, not in the middle