Early this week, Tom DeLay assumed an uncharacteristically visible role in the Terri Schiavo case, pressing Congress to intervene, invoking God and attacking Ms. Schiavo's husband before television cameras and on the House floor. Now, with the prospects of any intervention essentially dashed in the courts, he has slipped out of the spotlight. Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader, is not alone. Republican responses, including those of President Bush and Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, have become muted in the face of the legal setbacks and of polls that show overwhelming disapproval of Congressional intervention as well as a perception among the public that lawmakers attempting it were motivated by politics. A CBS News poll released Thursday found that 82 percent of respondents believed that the president and Congress should stay out of the case, while 13 percent thought they should intervene.
Republican Congressional officials say the lower profile is partly just a reflection of the fact that Congress, having already returned once to pass a law that fought Ms. Schiavo's death, has again departed Washington for the Easter recess. It is also, they say, a gesture of respect to a dying woman and her family, rather than an accommodation to politics. Still, for Mr. DeLay in particular, the decision to step forward in the first place - after weeks in which he had methodically avoided television cameras as he fended off questions about his ethics - may prove to be crucial in what could turn out to be his most difficult year in Congress. While the Schiavo case may have energized his conservative supporters, Democrats and some independent analysts say, it may also have thrust him into the national consciousness at the very moment his opponents are trying to make him a symbol of Republican excess and force another ethics investigation.
"Tom is doing everything backwards from the way I'd be inclined to do it," said one Democrat, Jim Wright, a fellow Texan who himself was forced out as speaker of the House in 1989 after failing to surmount challenges to his ethics and business dealings. "He seems to want to keep hostility at an agitated level."
Some Democrats have begun drawing parallels between Mr. DeLay and another Republican who eventually became a weight on his party, former Speaker Newt Gingrich. "The public is beginning to sense a whiff of extremism in the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "If it continues, it could prove very detrimental to them and good for us."
It is not just Democrats who share that view. In a regular e-mail commentary he distributes, former Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, wrote, "If I were a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2006, I would make DeLay the issue in the campaign right now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26delay.html
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