Enlarge imageBy Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With a crucial Supreme Court appointment on his mind, President George W. Bush left on his fourth trip this year to Europe on Tuesday to visit Iraq war ally Denmark and attend a Group of Eight summit in Scotland.
Bush was taking reading materials with him on board Air Force One on a variety of candidates to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and whoever he nominates for Senate confirmation will be the subject of a fierce political battle back home.
No decision on a nominee to replace O’Connor was expected until after Bush returns on Friday.
Bush was to arrive in Copenhagen on Tuesday night and hold talks on Wednesday with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
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Denmark has more than 500 troops stationed in Iraq, and Bush said of Rasmussen last week: "He’s a good man. He’s got a good, strong backbone."
Ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, Bush was somewhat at odds with the summit host, Prime Minister Tony Blair, over how much resources to devote to fighting poverty in Africa and global warming.
While Bush announced a $1.2 billion anti-malaria campaign last week that he said would double U.S. assistance to Africa over five years, Blair has been pushing a far bolder agenda to raise $25 billion to $50 billion a year.
No breakthrough was seen at Gleneagles, as the leaders were more likely to promote a deal already reached to write off debts for a number of poor African nations.
Lael Branaird, a poverty expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, said Bush’s opposition could have a ripple effect on other countries.
OTHER COUNTRIES
"My prediction is that the U.S. is simply not going to budge and will continue not to budge, and by virtue of not budging gives license to some of the other countries to balk at this," she said.
Bush and Blair were also at odds over the issue of global warming. Bush repeated to reporters last week his position that "the United States recognizes there’s warming, and that some of that is caused by man-made emissions," but said he would continue to resist mandatory requirements as outlined by the Kyoto treaty.
The other G8 nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia -- have signed up to the protocol to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, which came into force in February.
Bush was sticking to his position that Kyoto requirements would damage the U.S. economy and cost jobs.
"Kyoto would really have hurt our economy a lot," Bush said. "Kyoto didn’t include countries like India and China. And now is the chance to work with developed nations and developing nations to develop a way to share technologies, for example, that will enable us to achieve the objective we want."
In between summit sessions, Bush was to keep his focus on choosing his first nominee to the Supreme Court.
O’Connor’s replacement, the first in more than a decade, could shift the balance of power on the court, which has been closely divided between the conservative majority and a more liberal faction.
Conservatives have already mounted a campaign against one possibility for the court, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel and a longtime Bush aide dating back to when Bush was governor of Texas. Bush may want to make history by selecting the first Hispanic American for the Supreme Court.
In an interview printed in USA Today on Tuesday, Bush said special-interest groups should tone down the heated rhetoric over the nomination.
"Al Gonzales is a great friend of mine," Bush told the paper. "When a friend gets attacked, I don’t like it."
Other possible candidates are conservative U.S. Appeals Court judges J. Harvie Wilkinson, J. Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Emilio Garza.
