Unlike his first choice, Harriet Miers, who was forced to withdraw last week after a conservative revolt, Mr Alito has been a federal appeals court judge for 15 years with a long and consistently conservative “paper trail” of judgments behind him.

With Mr Alito’s nomination Mr Bush re-energised his conservative base, mollified a fractured Republican Party and reverted to a political strategy that marked much of his first term: laying down the gauntlet to Democrats.

They raised the threat of a Senate filibuster and liberals expressed outrage that the President was seeking to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, a relative moderate, with a hardline conservative who would tilt the Supreme Court’s balance of power decisively to the right.

A Gallup poll yesterday showed that after last week’s indictment of Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff in the CIA-leak scandal, the Miers debacle, Hurricane Katrina and the 2,000th US death in Iraq, 55 per cent of Americans judge Mr Bush’s presidency to be a failure. The risk for Mr Bush is that a polarising Supreme Court battle could further alienate moderates and independents.

Mr Bush said that Mr Alito, in contrast to Ms Miers, had “more prior judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in more than 70 years”. He expressed confidence that the US Senate would be impressed by Mr Alito’s “distinguished record, his measured judicial temperament and his tremendous personal integrity”.

Mr Alito also dwelt on his experience, describing how, before he became a judge, he argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court as an assistant to President Reagan’s Solicitor-General. Speaking the language of judicial conservatism, he pledged to remember the “limited role courts play in our constitutional system”.

Indeed, Mr Alito, a 55-year-old Italian-American, has earned the nickname “Scalito” because lawyers say that his judicial philosophy invites comparisons with that of Antonin Scalia, one of the Supreme Court’s two most conservative members. Mr Alito has often been the lone dissenter since the elder President Bush appointed him in 1990 to Philadelphia’s Third Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most liberal in the country.

Although it is not clear if he would vote to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gives women a constitutional right to abortion, Mr Alito did argue in 1991 that a woman should notify her husband before she seeks an abortion, a stance rejected by the Supreme Court. His predecessor, Mrs O’Connor, was often the swing vote on the finely balanced nine-member court on bitterly contested social issues such as abortion and affirmative action.

In choosing Mr Alito, a white Princeton and Yale-educated male, Mr Bush also passed up the chance to replace Mrs O’Connor with another woman.

The Religious Right has waited a generation for this chance to tip the court’s ideology decisively their way. That is why they reacted so furiously to the nomination of Ms Miers, who had never been a judge and whose stance on many issues was ambiguous.

Liberals have also spent years preparing for this fight, with pressure groups drafting elaborate plans backed by substantial war chests.

Senate Democrats lack the vote to defeat the confirmation but Harry Reid, their leader, raised the prospect of a filibuster, a blocking tactic that could trigger the so-called “nuclear option” whereby Republicans would use their Senate majority to abolish the right to filibuster judicial nominees.

Gary Bauer, president of Conservative America’s Values, said: “President Bush has hit a grand-slam home run.”

He predicted a fierce confirmation battle, but added: “At least now the President is having a battle with his political opponents and not with his friends.”

• Dick Cheney, the Vice- President, named David Addington as his chief of staff and John Hannah as his National Security Adviser yesterday. Both roles were formerly performed by Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Mr Hannah played a central policymaking role in building the case for the Iraq war.

  SAMUEL ALITO

  Age: 55. Son of Italian immigrants.
  
  Education: Princeton and Yale Law School.

  Experience: Judge, US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 1990-present; US attorney (prosecutor) for the district of New Jersey, 1987-9

  Family: Wife, Martha-Ann, and two children
  
  KEY JUDGMENTS

• ACLU v Schundler 1997: Argued that a Christmas display on city property did not violate separation of Church and State doctrines
  
• Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey v Farmer 2000: Ruled against a New Jersey law banning partial birth abortions

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