President Bush is having another run at getting John R. Bolton confirmed by the Senate as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Bolton was nominated by Mr. Bush last year, but after a thorough examination of his record senators split over the appointment and Bolton opponents twice blocked a vote on the nomination. Mr. Bush then bypassed the constitutional "advise and consent" role of the Senate and gave Mr. Bolton, instead, a recess appointment, while the Senate was out of session, which allows him to hold the job until January without a confirmation vote.

To keep his appointee on the job beyond this year, President Bush has renominated Mr. Bolton for the post, hoping that his performance in the past year will win him confirmation. He may also be thinking that attitudes in the Senate have changed sufficiently that it will not turn him down again, or that a number of senators will take the position that Mr. Bush is a lame-duck president and it is better to wait him out with this incompetent appointee in place rather than force the nomination of someone else who would then have to be confirmed.

It's incredible to look back over the history of some of those who have served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois and two-time presidential candidate; Arthur Goldberg, who was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; or the intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most distinguished senators from New York -- and realize that Mr. Bush is trying to foist on the nation the undistinguished and difficult Mr. Bolton. It is also perfectly obvious that the United Nations is -- now, especially -- a forum in which the United States should be represented by its best, not by an ideological, combative eccentric like John Bolton.

The best one can say about his unconfirmed year there is that he apparently wasn't quite as bad as his critics expected him to be. He nonetheless won America no friends at the United Nations, and there is no reason for the Senate to change its previous tune on Mr. Bolton. Nor is there any reason for senators to accept the president pushing down their throats someone they have already spurned, caving in on a matter of importance in which he failed to respect their constitutional role.

It is definitely time for Mr. Bolton to go home.