NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Congressional Democrats called for the resignation of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Harvey Pitt Wednesday, accusing him of being at the beck and call of the accounting industry he's supposed to be regulating.

Specifically, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., objected to Pitt withdrawing his support of John Biggs, chairman of TIAA-CREF and an advocate of tough accounting oversight, to head a new, independent board to oversee the accounting industry.

"We are deeply concerned that ... Pitt's recent actions related to selection of a chairman of the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board may have been motivated by inappropriate intervention by the accounting industry or its representatives," the Democrats said in a letter to President Bush.

The Democrats said Pitt's "repeated insensitivity suggests an arrogant indifference to the appearance of conflicts of interest."

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer called the request "a tired old cry ... a political charge ... that has no substance."

Pitt, a Bush appointee, has previously represented all Big Five auditing firms as a private securities lawyer. Democrats have long bemoaned his presence atop the SEC during a period of investor crisis in corporate accounting that began with the collapse of Enron Corp. and helped sink stock prices this year.

"We are asking the President to nominate a new SEC chairman ... someone who understands the importance of avoiding even the appearance of conflict of interest ... especially now, with confidence in the market still so fragile," Daschle said in a press conference Wednesday.

For many months, Pitt and Bush resisted making sweeping reforms of corporate governance; but the collapse of WorldCom Group spurred Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the most sweeping reform of corporate governance since the Great Depression.

That legislation mandated the creation of an independent accounting oversight board, and Pitt has been under attack lately, within the SEC and in Congress, over his top pick to head the new board, according to news reports, .

Government sources dispute recent reports that SEC officials had offered and then, under pressure from accounting firms, withdrawn support for Biggs to be the board's first chair. A source familiar with recent discussions among SEC commissioners and staff told CNNfn that Biggs is still the "leading candidate" for the job.

Sources said that early publicity concerning Bigg's position as the preferred candidate of Chairman Pitt and Commissioner Harvey Goldschmidt resulted in members of Congress and others engaging in political sniping at the choice, before the selection process was fully developed.

And government sources stressed that it was Pitt, after all, who made Biggs the top choice, and that criticism of the SEC chairman ignores Pitt's primary role in the selection process.