US: The future of John Bolton's nomination as US ambassador to the United Nations hung by a thread last night as Democrats mounted a last-minute effort to prevent his approval in an up-or-down Senate vote.
Senate majority leader Bill Frist said yesterday he planned to ask for a vote late last night to end a filibuster on Mr Bolton's nomination. To win the necessary 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to end a filibuster, Dr Frist needs the support of several Democrats to bolster the Republicans majority of 55.
US president George Bush yesterday said that Mr Bolton "ought to get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor". He said he nominated the former State Department official for a reason, that the UN needed reform and Mr Bolton was a reformer. "We want more transparency and less bureaucracy" at the UN, he told reporters at the White House.
Mr Bush declined to say whether, as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested at the weekend, he would bypass the Senate and have Mr Bolton installed as ambassador in a recess appointment if Democrats persisted in holding up the confirmation vote.
The Senate plans to take a July 4th recess and, under the US constitution, a president can make an appointment during a recess that could last in Mr Bolton's case for six months.
The Democratic case against Mr Bolton, whose nomination has been stalled for more than three months, centres on claims that as the State Department official in charge of weapons proliferation, he exaggerated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Cuba and bullied junior staff who disagreed with his views.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that since Mr Bolton was nominated - a move said to have been approved if not initiated by Dr Rice to remove him from the State Department - several policy initiatives he had been obstructing had come to a successful conclusion.
These include an agreement with Moscow over a US proposal to keep Russian nuclear fuel from falling into the hands of terrorists and the end of the contentious US campaign to oust the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei.
He had also blocked the European attempt to negotiate a settlement with Iran over its nuclear programme. A recess appointment would raise the stakes in the stand-off between the White House and the Senate.
"We're not going to let the administration tell us we're not entitled to exercise our oversight responsibility," said Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. It would send to the UN an ambassador "who lacks the confidence of the United States Senate" and would "cripple" Mr Bolton as an envoy, said Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut.
Democrats defended attempts to block a vote at this stage on the grounds that the administration is refusing to make available information about Mr Bolton's role in the State Department.
They say they want to check a list of 36 US officials against names that Mr Bolton requested from national security excerpts of phone calls they made to determine whether he improperly used intelligence to intimidate officials.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, offered a list of seven names to try to resolve the issue but Democrats rejected the compromise.
They have also asked for documents on testimony that he was preparing to give to the House of Representatives in July 2003 concerning Syria's weapons capability, to see if he misled the Senate during his confirmation hearings, when he testified he was not involved in the preparation of that testimony.
Dr Rice said in a television interview from Cairo that Mr Roberts "has already spoken to the issue of the nature of those inquiries".