Washington ? Support for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sank further Thursday as Democrats proposed a no-confidence vote, a fifth GOP senator called for his resignation and yet another Republican predicted he won’t survive a congressional investigation.

The White House shrugged off the no-confidence idea as merely symbolic, and President Bush continued to stand by his embattled friend.

By any measure, the news was not good for Gonzales.

Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California said they will seek a Senate vote on a nonbinding resolution expressing what senators of both parties have said for weeks: that Gonzales has become too weakened to run the Justice Department.

“It seems the only person who has confidence in the attorney general is President Bush,” Schumer told reporters. “The president long ago should have asked the attorney general to step down.”

“I think the time has come for the Senate to express its will,” Feinstein said. “We lack confidence in the attorney general.”

The White House dismissed the Democrats’ proposals.

“A ‘no-confidence’ vote is nothing more than a meaningless political act, not that that’s stopped them before,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. “The attorney general has the full confidence of the president.”

For all of the administration’s defense, several GOP officials acknowledged privately that Republicans were still reeling from testimony this week that Gonzales, when he was Bush’s White House counsel, pressured Attorney General John Ashcroft to certify the legality of Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program while Ashcroft lay in intensive care.

Asked twice during a news conference Thursday if he personally ordered Gonzales to Ashcroft’s hospital room, Bush refused to answer.

“There’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen. I’m not going to talk about it,” Bush said.

James Comey’s account to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schumer said, turned more lawmakers against Gonzales.

One, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, on Thursday became the fifth Republican senator to demand that Gonzales leave.

“I would hope that the attorney general understands that the department is suffering right now, and he does the right thing, and that is allows the president to provide new leadership,” Coleman told reporters on a conference call.