Lone Democrat quits Bush cabinet

Norman Mineta

Mineta, commerce secretary under president Bill Clinton who was kept on by Bush as the only Democrat in his cabinet, announced the move in a letter to Bush on Friday, White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.

"After serving as your secretary of transportation for over five productive and memorable years, it is time for me to move on to other challenges," Mineta said in his resignation letter.

Mineta's political philosophy was honed when he was imprisoned as a child in a desolate World War II-era internment center set up to house Americans of Japanese descent viewed by the government as a threat after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to move from their homes, mostly on the West Coast, into the camps for the duration of the war.