Washington ? President Bush appears ready to announce a new Supreme Court nomination today, moving quickly after a weekend of consultations to put forward a replacement for the ill-fated choice of Harriet Miers in hopes of recapturing political momentum, according to Republicans close to the White House.

Judging by the names the White House floated by political allies in recent days, Bush seems ready to pick a candidate with a long track record of conservative jurisprudence – one who would mollify the Republican base, whose opposition to Miers’ nomination helped scuttle it. Several GOP strategists said the most likely choice seemed to be federal appeals Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., with judges J. Michael Luttig and Alice M. Batchelder also in the running.

Any of the three would draw support from many conservative activists, lawyers and columnists who vigorously attacked Miers as an underqualified presidential crony. At the same time, the choice would have years of court rulings that liberals could use against them. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Sunday that he already has warned the White House that nominating Alito – who is often compared to Justice Antonin Scalia – would “create a lot of problems.”

Bush spent the weekend at Camp David huddled with Miers, who remains his White House counsel and is therefore in charge of the judicial selection process, along with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. As the three talked, White House officials contacted prominent conservatives to test the reaction to various candidates.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Sunday also embraced Alito, in particular. “Alito, Luttig, all these people are solid conservatives,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

But Senate Democrats, who largely kept quiet during the Miers nomination to enjoy the Republican civil war it spawned, signaled they would come off the sidelines in the case of a more vocal conservative nominee.

“If he wants to divert attention from all of his many problems, he can send us somebody that is going to create a lot of problems,” Reid said on CNN. “I think this time he would be ill advised to do that. But the right wing, the radical right wing is pushing a lot of his buttons, and he may just go along with them.”