After an extraordinary intervention by the US Congress, the House of Representatives, which is controlled by Republicans, was poised to pass legislation this morning that would send back to a federal court the case of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed on a judge’s order on Friday.

The congressional Bill, prolonging the legal, medical and personal drama of a case that has pitted the woman’s husband against her parents, and pro-life conservatives against right-to-die advocates, focused solely on Mrs Schiavo, who this morning begins her third full day without nourishment and fluids. Doctors say that it could take two weeks before she dies.

The Bill, which Mr Bush says that he will sign as soon as it reaches his desk in the Oval Office, would remove control of the case from Florida’s courts, which repeatedly have ruled that her tube should be removed, and force a review by a federal court. Its backers say that her tube would have to be reconnected pending a review.

Republicans hope to overcome the objections of some Democrats that the move is an unconstitutional intervention undermining judicial independence. Yesterday, in the House of Representatives, Democrats refused to allow the measure to go ahead with an informal voice vote, forcing Republicans to bring more members back to Washington for a roll-call vote that requires at least 218 of the House’s 435 members to be present. They hoped to reconvene early today.

“The President intends to sign legislation as quickly as possible once it is passed,” Scott McClellan, Mr Bush’s spokesman, said as the President prepared to leave his ranch in Texas. “This is about defending life.”

The Bill, which received Senate support after House Republicans compromised and agreed to let it apply only to the Schiavo case, came after a judge in Florida ignored another unprecedented congressional manoeuvre on Friday to save her life.

Conservative politicians then subpoenaed Mrs Schiavo, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, to appear as a witness on Capitol Hill on March 25, in an effort to give her witness protection.

Judge George Greer, who was under police protection last night after receiving death threats, ruled that Congress had no business trying to defy Florida’s courts. He ordered the tube to be removed.

Mr Schiavo, his wife’s legal guardian, said that he was “outraged” by Congress’s latest move. He accused congressional Republicans of political opportunism.

Mrs Schiavo, 41, has been at the centre of a battle between her husband and her parents since 1990, when a heart attack starved her brain of oxygen, leaving her in what courtappointed doctors say is a persistent vegetative state.

She has no will and her husband, who has two children with a new partner of ten years, has successfully argued in a string of courts that she would not have wanted to be kept alive by a feeding tube. Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, dispute this, saying that their daughter responds to them and her condition could improve.On Friday the US Supreme Court, for the second time in a week, refused to hear the case.

Mrs Schiavo’s parents informed their daughter’s hospice that the tube could be reinserted as early as Monday. It has twice been removed before, only to be reinserted, most recently in 2003.

That year, Jeb Bush, Florida’s Governor and the President’s brother, pushed an emergency law through the Florida legislature authorising him to order the tube’s reinsertion six days after doctors removed it under court order. That law was later ruled unconstitutional.

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