ASHINGTON, March 25 - 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 prospect that she will be kept alive 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 trying 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 enact 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. "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."

After being rebuked three times by the House ethics committee last year, Mr. DeLay has been linked to an investigation into campaign finance irregularities in Texas and to potential violations of House travel rules. But he has angrily rejected suggestions that he seized on the Schiavo case to create distraction from those troubles, and aides say his involvement grew out of strongly held beliefs.

"Congressman DeLay certainly wasn't guided by polls," said his spokesman, Dan Allen.

"He saw something that needed to be done and worked with other leaders to make sure we accomplished it in the most expedited fashion possible," Mr. Allen said of the quickly enacted law that sent the case into the federal courts.

Republican strategists say they expect no political repercussions from the episode.

"I am not sure it raised his name ID," said Carl M. Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "A month from now, people are not going to remember," he said, and 20 months from now, in the 2006 elections, "it will be irrelevant."

Mr. DeLay himself has linked the Schiavo case to his ethics problems. In a private speech to supporters, he drew a connection between the way that case was headed and the attacks against him - evidence, he suggested, of a coordinated campaign to undermine American conservatism.

"When they can knock out a leader, then no other leader will step forward for a while, because they don't want to go through the same thing," he told members of the Family Research Council, in remarks that were secretly recorded and then repeatedly played on television news. "If they go after and get a pastor, then other pastors shrink from what they should be doing."

"That whole syndicate that they have going on right now," he said, "is for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to destroy the conservative movement."

Leaders of social conservatism commend Mr. DeLay's determination in pressing the Schiavo bill and say it reflects a longtime but occasionally unrecognized commitment to issues favoring life.

"He doesn't go around crowing about it," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who worked with Mr. DeLay to produce a bill. "I don't think others have spoken enough about the work that he has done."

But Democrats could barely conceal their delight at the sight of Mr. DeLay on television again. They say his multiple interviews and appearances at news conferences provided a damaging close-up of a man with whom much of the public was previously unfamiliar.

The opposition has tried before, with little success, to make Mr. DeLay a liability for House Republicans. Lawmakers on the receiving end of those attacks say the efforts failed precisely because he is an unknown quantity to much of the country.

Representative Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican from Connecticut whom the Democrats tried to tie closely to the House leadership in last year's election campaign, said of the voters in his district, "They didn't know who he is, and they didn't really care."

Yet there is evidence that Mr. DeLay's visibility is on the rise. A Gallup poll in February showed that 53 percent of those questioned had formed an opinion of him, compared with only 28 percent in 1999. In recent weeks, even before the burst of attention over the Schiavo episode, he had been a subject of multiple news reports.

Dr. Frist, a former transplant surgeon who is considering a run for president, has also been dealing with the effects of intervention in the Schiavo case. Aides rebut Democratic criticism of him for suggesting, based on her medical records and his viewing of videotapes of her, that Ms. Schiavo is more sentient than has been found by many doctors who have closely evaluated her condition.

"The suggestion by some that Senator Frist was making a 'diagnosis' in the Schiavo case is absurd," said his spokesman, Bob Stevenson. "Nowhere in his comments was he substituting his opinion for others. But with medical experts split on Terri Schiavo's condition and a woman's life at stake, he suggested the court solicit additional tests and attempt to reach a medical consensus on her condition. "