Washington ? Democratic leaders on Wednesday asked President Bush to remove Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt, whom they accuse of bending to pressure from the accounting industry and withdrawing support from a candidate to head a new oversight board.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., told Bush in a letter that Pitt’s “repeated insensitivity suggests an arrogant indifference to the appearance of conflicts of interest.”

Pitt is “giving the accounting industry a veto over who will head the new board,” Daschle said at a news conference on Social Security. “This is exactly the kind of abuse the new board was created to prevent.”

Pitt, who previously represented Wall Street’s big players and all Big Five auditing firms as a private securities lawyer, is back in the hot seat in a year of corporate accounting scandals that started with the collapse of Enron Corp.

He was criticized last spring for meeting privately with the heads of companies under investigation by the SEC, and the watchdog group Common Cause demanded his resignation.

In response, Pitt is disputing recent newspaper reports that SEC officials had offered and then withdrawn support for the candidate to head the new board, who is an advocate of tough accounting oversight.

Bush, who appointed Pitt in spring 2001 to head the market watchdog agency, has stood by him.

In a letter Tuesday, two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged Pitt “to resist the special pleadings of your former clients in the accounting profession” and appoint John Biggs as head of the new oversight board.

“The accountants cannot, and should not, be permitted to pick their regulator or exercise veto power over” the SEC’s choices for the oversight board, Reps. John Dingell of Michigan and Edward Markey of Massachusetts wrote Pitt.

Dingell and Markey also have criticized Pitt’s reported meeting recently with the chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a big Wall Street firm that the SEC is investigating for alleged favoritism in distributing hot new stocks to company executives.

The new oversight board was created by far-reaching legislation enacted this summer in response to the wave of scandals.