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As Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales is the top enforcer of our nation's laws. Gonzales, however, has not risen to the challenge of his appointment and has betrayed the public trust. Again and again, Gonzales has demonstrated that he is more loyal to partisans within the Bush administration rather than to his duties as America's chief law enforcement officer. He had also publicly lied to the American people. He should be impeached.

On March 13, while discussing the U.S. Attorneys purge, Alberto Gonzales said: "...I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood." Yet new evidence shows he attended at least one meeting, on Nov. 27, where he approved a plan to execute the firings.

This was not Gonzales' first betrayal of the public trust. Gonzales' spectacular failures to defend the constitution include the following:

• Under his watch the FBI has been abusing the USA PATRIOT ACT to spy on Americans without judicial review.
• As designer of policies that allowed the U.S. government to abandon the Geneva Conventions, he is the lead architect of U.S. use of torture, kidnapping and secret prisons.
• He contradicted the recommendations of his own staff to end challenges to voter suppression -- what a federal judge termed a "new poll tax" in Georgia.

These failures and more are outlined in a powerful editorial calling for Gonzales' resignation published in the New York Times recently. But asking for Gonzales' resignation -- as the New York Times and other major papers have editorialized -- is not enough. He should be impeached by the House of Representatives, and stand trial for his crimes.