SWEET senate victories provided the icing on the cake of President Bush’s victory yesterday as Republicans tightened their grip on the upper chamber by as many as four seats.

They increased their majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, meaning that Mr Bush should find it much easier to push his agenda through Congress.

Of greatest concern to Democrats, Mr Bush should now be able to mould the Supreme Court in his own conservative image for a generation to come.

At least three Supreme Court judges are likely to step down in the course of the next four years, and Mr Bush should have little trouble winning the approval of the Senate for his nominees.

In a further blow to the Democrats, Tom Daschle lost his seat as Senate Minority Leader, becoming the first party leader in the chamber to be voted out of the Senate in 52 years.

Republicans also celebrated the election of Mel Martinez in Florida to become the first Cuban-born senator. Last night the Republican tally stood at 54 seats, compared with 45 for the Democrats, but Mr Bush’s party also predicted victory in the undecided state of Alaska.

“It really is monumental,” said Bill Frist, the surgeon who leads the Republican majority in the Senate. The outcome, he said, was “a huge endorsement of the President of the United States”.

The loss of the Senate Minority Leader was a major blow to John Kerry and his dwindling pool of Democrats in the chamber. Mr Daschle, regarded as an effective strategist, lost by 4,535 votes to John Thune, a former member of the House of Representatives.

Up to election day, Republicans had held the slimmest of margins, with a 51-49 split.

But victories in Georgia, where Johnny Isakson, a Methodist estate agency executive, took a seat vacated by a pro-Bush Democrat, and in Louisiana, where David Vitter, a Catholic lawyer, became the first Republican to win in the state for 200 years, increased the majority. Republicans also won two seats from Democrats in the Carolinas, where Richard Burr won a seat vacated by John Edwards.

Commentators said that the changes would allow President Bush to push on with his agenda largely unemcumbered. “The President is going to forge ahead with his agenda of tax cuts and restructuring social security,” Randall Strahan, a politics professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, said.

The Republican advance in the Senate will also make it easier for Mr Bush to appoint more conservative judges to the Supreme Court, an issue of profound concern for moderates who want women to maintain their right to have an abortion.

Some experts believe that Mr Bush will try to overturn this right using appointments to the court, an issue that has come to the fore with the departure of William Rehnquist, the court’s conservative chief, who has thyroid cancer and according to some sources has only months to live.

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