President Bush celebrated a major political victory over American environmental campaigners yesterday when the House of Representatives voted to allow oil companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
"We showed them last night how we can break Washington gridlock," a beaming Mr Bush said as he arrived on Capitol Hill with his vice-president, Mr Dick Cheney.
The two men took a photocall with Republican congressional leaders after the White House also managed to break up a bipartisan coalition which was threatening to force Mr Bush to veto a patients' rights charter.
Mr Bush's win by 223 to 206 votes yesterday morning means that drilling could begin on a 2,000-acre site in the Arctic coastal plain of northern Alaska as early as next spring unless the Senate throws out the proposal this autumn. Democratic opponents of drilling have promised to filibuster the plan in the upper house.
Environmentalists had made yesterday's vote their battleground of choice in attempts to mobilise congressional opinion against Mr Bush's wide-ranging energy plans, in which the drive to increase oil and gas production is given pride of place at the expense of conservation.
The area at the centre of the controversy is located between Prudhoe Bay and the Canadian border in the north-east of Alaska. The refuge is home to hundreds of species of birds and some 240 Inupiat natives.
Mr Bush made drilling in ANWR a central pledge of his 2000 election campaign. But his plan was only carried this week after the House carried an amendment restricting the drilling area to 2,000 acres and pledging to use half of the royalties from the project to finance extra research on renewable energy resources.
Campaigners were stunned by the ease with which the Arctic drilling plan was carried. Republicans, by contrast, were elated. The vote was "a tremendous victory for America, for the economy and for the environment," the Energy Secretary, Mr Spencer Abraham, said.
Yesterday's vote was a tactical coup for the Republican congressional whip, Mr Tom DeLay, who masterminded the victory with the support of the normally pro-Democratic Teamsters' Union.
"We need to take control over our own destiny and this Bill gives the American people much more control over their energy security," Mr DeLay said as the House passed a wide-ranging Energy Bill which included the Arctic drilling provision by 240 to 189 votes.
"At a time of widespread layoffs and economic slowdown, opening ANWR will lead to the creation of more than 735,000 jobs all across America," the Alaskan Teamsters' leader, Mr Jerry Hood claimed.
Democratic Congressman Edward Markey who had led the fight to maintain an earlier ban on drilling in the 19-million acre refuge said social welfare programmes would be sacrificed to pay for government energy plans.
The day-long debate on the energy package was marked by repeated pro-drilling claims that opening up the Arctic refuge was necessary to help secure American "energy independence" from world oil prices.