Bush's choice for Secretary of Interior wins approval

A radical supporter of deregulation and states' rights, Ms Gale Norton, was yesterday approved by the US Senate as Secretary of the Interior. She won by 75 votes to 24, despite the reservations of most environmental organisations and many Democrats.

The Senate's Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, voted 10-2 to send on the name of Mr John Ashcroft, Mr Bush's controversial nominee for Attorney General, for expected approval by the full Senate, which may vote on it as early as tomorrow.

A threatened filibuster by Mr Ted Kennedy is not, however, likely to materialise as Democratic sources say they do not believe they will have the necessary 41 votes out of 100 to block the local equivalent of a parliamentary guillotine.

Earlier, Republican and Democratic senators expressed radically different views of Ms Norton. Texas Republican Ms Kay Bailey said she could think of no better qualified candidate for the job of Interior Secretary, while Ms Barbara Boxer (Dem, California) said she could think of none worse.

Ms Boxer said the parallels with the testimony of Mr James Watt were "chilling". Mr Watt, President Reagan's Interior Secretary, also made "nice, warm, and fuzzy statements" but the result was "catastrophic", she said, in terms of opening wilderness land up for mining and decontrol of strip-mining.

Ms Norton had a record of being "against every single law that she says she will now protect". Ms Boxer said that it was a fundamental fallacy to see the Californian energy crisis as an argument for opening up the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration.

The origins of the crisis lay in the refusal of the electricity firms to build new plants in a bid to control the power supply.

The characterisations of Ms Norton by extreme elements in the environmental movement were nothing short of character assassination, said the chairman of the Energy Committee, Alaska Republican Mr Frank Murkowski.

He insisted that Ms Norton had been misrepresented on several issues, most notably the "right to pollute", a concept she had used only in the context of emissions trading in the global warming debate.

He read into the record a letter of support for the nomination from Mr James Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union, who said that development of the oilfields of the ANWR would create 25,000 jobs for his members.

The Senate also confirmed Ms Christine Todd Whitman as Environmental Protection Agency director.