In a TPMtv Sunday Show Roundup, we survey the Alberto-Gonzales-confidence landscape on the Sunday morning talk shows. And what we find isn’t too pretty.

Last Thursday – in the wake of the spellbinding Senate testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, the resignation of current Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and the Washington Post's and McClatchy's recent disclosures of an expanded initial attorney removal list – Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) announced that they would introduce a Senate resolution expressing no confidence in Attorney General Gonzales.

“The time has come for the Senate to express its will,” said Feinstein at a Thursday press conference. “That will is simply to say that we lack confidence in this attorney general.”

After a relatively quiet week following his May 10th House testimony and an apparent dying down of the call-for-resignation din, Gonzales was back under the interrogation lamp on the Sunday talk shows. As Josh wrote Sunday night, “there's no mistaking that the tide has turned again on the AG.”

While our count of Republican senators calling for Gonzales's resignation currently stands at eleven, unequivocal supporters of the AG were difficult to find on Sunday morning.

When asked on ABC’s This Week whether he believed the attorney general could effectively run the Justice Department, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave a cryptic response:

Look, that’s for the president to decide. The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president. If the president says he’s satisfied with the job the attorney general’s doing, the opinions of senators are interesting and certainly make good fodder for Sunday talk shows. But as long as he’s satisfied the president, I think he’s going to continue.

In regards to the no-confidence resolution, McConnell seemed to have designs of his own:

Well, we won’t have a no-confidence resolution in the Senate unless there are other resolutions. In the Senate, nobody gets a clear shot. If there’s a resolution on Attorney General Gonzales, there will probably be another kind of resolution. So we’ll see what happens.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was even more evasive. When Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace asked him pointblank, “Do you still have confidence in Alberto Gonzales running the Justice Department?” Graham replied not yes, nor no, but rather:

Here's what I would like to see the Senate do. Find out the facts about the firing of the U.S. attorneys, make sure that — I don't believe there's any evidence of illegal behavior on the part of the attorney general. If the president wants to keep him in his job, I will work with him.

Then Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) dropped the bomb of the morning on CBS’s Face the Nation:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you, in fact, think Republicans, a sizable number, will join with Democrats on that? And what do you think the impact is going to be on the Attorney General?

SPECTER: Well, I think so. You already have six Republicans calling for his resignation. I have a sense, Bob, that before the vote is taken that Attorney General Gonzales may step down.

SCHIEFFER: Really?

SPECTER: Well, it is a very forceful, historical statement. Votes of no confidence are very rare. More than a century ago one was leveled against a sitting president. I think historically that is something which Attorney General Gonzales would like to avoid.

Then it was Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) - who, with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), originally introduced the idea of the Senate no-confidence vote on Gonzales - summed up his motivations on Fox News Sunday:

The bottom line is the only person who thinks that the attorney general should remain attorney general is the president. He's gotten virtually no support from even Republicans in the Senate. Just a handful have supported him. Six have called for him to step down. A dozen more have said very negative things about him. And so the president can keep him. He has the constitutional power to do it. But we have the constitutional power to try to pressure the president to understand that Gonzales is no good.

Gonzales was also a big topic on This Week’s Roundtable, in which George Will flatly stated that Gonzales can stay on as attorney general just as long as “you’re indifferent to the damage done to one of the most important departments in our government.” Katrina vanden Heuvel then hit the nail on the head, saying:

I think what’s happening here is Gonzales is a shield. And I think when Gonzales goes, the investigations continue … the fear that it’s into Rove, it’s into the White House, I mean that sickbed showdown was simply a window onto the larger lawlessness.

And apropos of vanden Heuvel’s contention that this scandal reaches far beyond the attorney general, Senator Schumer announced that he is sending letters to the president, to Vice President Cheney, and to Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, asking if they were the ones who ordered the hospital visit to Ashcroft, and if not, if they know who did order it.

Stay tuned…