TWO THINGS HAPPENED LAST WEEK that cast a sharp light on the real impetus behind the Democratic/media effort to bring down House majority leader Tom DeLay. The first was House approval, by a huge margin of 110 votes on final passage, of the permanent repeal of the federal inheritance tax. The second was DeLay's apology for having predicted negative consequences for judges such as those in the Terri Schiavo case who go out of their way to ignore the wishes of the other two branches of government.

The scheduling of the tax vote was not DeLay's decision alone. The default position of House Republicans is that you schedule your high-profile tax-cut votes in the week leading up to April 15. But sticking to that plan completely ignored the conventional 2005 wisdom of Washington elites (including many Senate Republicans) that in the face of big deficits, reduction or elimination of an important tax is at the very least far less appealing than in earlier years.

Evidently, when faced with a vote, most House members--all but one Republican (Jim Leach of Iowa) and dozens of Democrats--could not bring themselves to act on this supposedly self-evident insight. House support for final repeal of the inheritance tax reached its high-water mark in this, the fourth straight year the House endorsed it. If DeLay were out of the picture, it is hard to imagine the vote happening at all. Certainly no high officials in either the Senate or White House advocated such a vote, or even moved to follow suit once the huge bipartisan House margin suggested the likelihood that the repeal measure has retained all of its earlier political potency.

As to DeLay's apology for supposedly threatening America's judges, it wasn't nearly as abject as his critics desired. And he continues to advocate a House investigation of judicial supremacy and its many practitioners. What's interesting is not the extent to which DeLay climbed down, but the kind of man he is to show such indignation toward judicial conduct in the Schiavo case in the first place.

Most elected officials show indignation only in the wake of compelling poll data. At the time DeLay spoke out, and since, all the polling on the Schiavo case cut strongly against his stand. The kind of person who would be indignant in the face of near unanimity among the judges, the editorial writers, and the pollsters is apt to be someone who himself is deeply pro-life and socially conservative, not someone out to score political points or "stroke the base."

Moreover, as a pure analytic matter, DeLay's complaint about the inability of the legislative and executive branches to bring the judicial branch to any kind of account is among the most unassailable things he could have said. Yet we had the spectacle, for days on end, of the White House and the Republican Senate leadership hastening to explain how much they admire the independence of the judicial branch.

President Bush did not seem so admiring in his final (and best) debate with John Kerry last fall, when he explained his endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment as an effort to keep the nation's judicial elites from taking the decision on how to define marriage out of the hands of the American people. And if Bill Frist is so satisfied with the present state of the judiciary, how can he attach such importance to breaking the Democratic filibuster on the president's judicial nominees?