US: Whatever names President Bush may have considered to fill the vacancy in the US Supreme Court caused by Judge Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation, the furore being kicked up by partisans on both sides over the weekend may be giving him second thoughts.
Mr Bush spent the weekend at Camp David going over strategy with his advisers, while his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, heavily tipped for the job, took himself out of town to Baghdad.
Mr Bush has toyed with the idea of making Mr Gonzales the first Hispanic judge on the nine-member panel, according to top officials, but conservative groups around the US have combined to oppose the idea.
Paul Weyrich, the influential chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, said he had told the administration that Mr Gonzales's views on abortion are suspect and that the right does not consider him a true conservative.
Tom Minnery of the powerful evangelical group, Focus on the Family, said: "We would oppose him because we don't believe he has a philosophy that we can determine: he is someone who is apparently still developing his philosophy, and that's not good enough."
A delegation of conservative lawyers, led by C Boyden Gray, who heads up an organisation dedicated to influencing Mr Bush's choice, met White House chief of staff Andrew Card to warn him that selecting Mr Gonzales would splinter the conservative movement.
Mr Gonzales angered conservatives as chief justice of Texas in rulings on parental consent cases in Texas involving minors seeking abortions. Mr Gonzales has said that how he feels personally about Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court case that established a woman's constitutional right to abortion, "may differ with how I feel about it legally."
This is taken by conservatives to mean he would not vote against Roe v Wade in any new test of the right to abortion.
Many Democrats would also be unhappy with Mr Gonzales's civil rights credentials because as White House counsel he wrote the opinions relaxing US adherence to the Geneva Conventions relating to terror suspects.
Mr Bush has said he will not name a person to succeed Judge O'Connor until the week of July 11th at the earliest, leaving Republicans a relatively short time to influence his decision.
White House lawyers have given Mr Bush a dossier of potential candidates for him to study on his trip to Europe.
A Republican planning document provided to the Washington Post stressed the need to avoid disclosing the nominee's "personal political views or legal thinking on any issue."
Both sides will use the litmus test of abortion, on the grounds that the new justice could prove to be a critical vote in any attempt to get the Supreme Court restrict abortion rights in the future - the holy grail in the culture wars that have hotted up in America.
The president of the National Organisation for Women, which was holding its national convention in Nashville, Tennessee, over the weekend, declared a "state of emergency" for women's rights and vowed to fight against the nomination of an "extremist" judge who would set back the hard-won right to choose. "This is our time. This is our challenge," Kim Gandy told the 800 delegates who clapped and chanted "Hell no, we won't go, we won't go back."
The first woman on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor was the swing vote in a 5-4 decision in 1992 essentially reaffirming Roe v Wade.
The opposition to the appointment of a conservative judge is being led by Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group founded by Hollywood producer Normal Lear. It has launched a television commercial that shows Judge O'Connor's image and demands that Bush pick someone just as pragmatic to protect "our fundamental rights and freedoms" or risk dividing the country.
Conservatives have drawn up a list of judges for Mr Bush to consider. They have pointed to 5th Circuit judge Emilio Garza as a more conservative Hispanic judge than Mr Gonzales and Janice Rogers Brown, a Californian African American, if Mr Bush wanted to replace Judge O'Connor with a woman.
Judge Rogers Brown was confirmed as an appeals court judge last month only after a protracted Senate battle in which she was given an up-or-down vote when Democrats ended a filibuster against her as part of a deal with Republicans.