WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nomination of Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican is being held up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, raising the possibility that the post may be vacant when Pope Benedict XVI visits the United States in April.

The selection of anti-abortion advocate Glendon is opposed by Catholics for a Free Choice. No official holds on her confirmation have been filed, but failure to schedule a hearing blocks her confirmation. She is caught up in blanket Democratic opposition to Bush's final nominees.

Business tycoon Francis Rooney, current ambassador to the Holy See, has resigned and is expected to be gone by the time of the pope's American visit.

IRS DEMAND

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has informed Congress it must actually pass alternative minimum tax (AMT) relief, not just promise help, for taxpayers to receive refunds next year.

On Oct. 30, chairmen and ranking minority members of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees wrote Acting IRS Commissioner Linda Stiff that "we want to assure you that legislative relief is forthcoming so that no new taxpayers will be subject to the AMT for taxable year 2007." On the next day, Stiff responded that their assurance was not sufficient for the IRS to recalibrate computers. "We must ensure that our systems are prepared to process returns under the law as it exists now," she said.

This correspondence became known last week with Congress still having failed to "patch" the AMT. Refunds to income tax payers may be delayed 10 weeks.

SENATORIAL DISCOURTESY

Moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who normally promotes bipartisan amity, was furious Wednesday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declined to come to the Senate floor to answer Specter's charge that Reid had violated Senate rules in calling Republican colleagues "puppets."

"I have had my staff advise [Reid's] staff," Specter told the Senate, "that I intended to make some comments about him so that he would be notified and come to the floor. . . . His office is right adjacent to the floor. He is a minute or two away."

In decrying the Senate's year-end logjam, Reid on Tuesday declared on the floor: "President Bush is the man that's pulling the strings on the Republican puppets he has here." Specter responded, "I wonder if [Reid's] up to the job." Continued...