WASHINGTON (AP) – Flexing their political muscle against the White House, Democrats in the House and Senate are insisting that President Bush’s top aides describe their roles in the firings of eight federal prosecutors on the record and under oath.

A House committee was to vote Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for political director Karl Rove and other administration officials despite Mr. Bush’s declaration a day earlier that Democrats must accept his offer to allow the officials to talk privately to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but not under oath and not on the record.

Would he fight Democrats in court to protect his aides against congressional subpoenas?
“Absolutely,” Mr. Bush declared Tuesday in televised remarks from the White House.

Democrats promptly rejected the offer and announced that they would start authorizing subpoenas within 24 hours.

“Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That’s the formula for true accountability,” said Senator Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Bush said he worried that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution.

If neither side blinks, the dispute could end in court – ultimately the Supreme Court – in a politically messy development that would prolong what Bush called the “public spectacle” of the Justice Department’s firings, and public trashings, of the eight prosecutors.

Senator Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the Senate panel’s former chairman, appealed for pragmatism.

“It is more important to get the information promptly than to have months or years of litigation,” Mr. Specter said.

Mr. Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, decried any attempts by Democrats to engage in “a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants.”

“It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available,” the president said.

Mr. Bush defended Attorney General Alberto Gonzales against demands from congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans that Mr. Gonzales resign over his handling of the prosecutors’s attorneys’ firings over the past year.

“He’s got support with me,” Mr. Bush said. “I support the attorney general.”

Democrats say the prosecutors’ dismissals were politically motivated. Mr. Gonzales initially had asserted the firings were performance-related, not based on political considerations.

But e-mails released earlier this month between the Justice Department and the White House contradicted that assertion and led to a public apology from Mr. Gonzales over the handling of the matter.

The e-mails showed that Mr. Rove, as early as Jan. 6, 2005, questioned whether the prosecutors attorneys should all be replaced at the start of Mr. Bush’s second term, and to some degree worked with former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and former Mr. Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson to get some prosecutors dismissed.

In his remarks Tuesday, Mr. Bush emphasized that he appoints federal prosecutors and it is natural to consider replacing them. While saying he disapproved of how the decisions were explained to Congress, he insisted “there is no indication that anybody did anything improper.”

Nonetheless, the Senate on Tuesday voted 94-2 to strip Gonzales of his authority to fill prosecutor vacancies without Senate confirmation. Democrats contend the Justice Department and White House purged the eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were leading political corruption investigations, after a change in the USA Patriot Act gave Mr. Gonzales the new authority.

“What happened in this case sends a signal really through intimidation by purge: ‘Don’t quarrel with us any longer,'” said Senator Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, a former federal prosecutor.

The White House had signaled last week that it would not oppose the legislation if it also passed the House and reached Mr. Bush’s desk.

Mr. Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers Tuesday that they could interview Mr. Rove, Ms. Miers, deputy White House counsel William Kelley and J. Scott Jennings, a deputy to political director Sara Taylor – who in turn works for Mr. Rove.

Any such discussions would occur on the president’s terms, Mr. Fielding said, in private, “without the need for an oath” and without a transcript.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

“If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed,” Mr. Bush said. “If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see.”

Senator Schumer, Democrat of New York who is leading the Senate probe into the firings, dismissed the White House offer.

“It’s sort of giving us the opportunity to talk to them, but not giving us the opportunity to get to the bottom of what really happened here,” Mr. Schumer said.