The five plaintiffs claim that DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee raised and spent illegal corporate, or “soft,” money in the 2002 election in Texas. Specifically, they allege that of the $1.5 million TRMPAC spent in a campaign against 23 Democratic candidates for the Texas House, $723,737 was unreported soft money — which, with a few exceptions, cannot be spent in political campaigns in Texas. TRMPAC treasurer Bill Ceverha is the last defendant standing in the prelude to one more civil suit and a criminal case not yet on the docket in the state district court in Austin. (DeLay’s Washington political aide Jim Ellis and his Austin fundraiser John Colyandro have been dropped as defendants until the criminal case in which they have been indicted is resolved.)

Another DeLay housemate from Macho Manor, Bill Hammond, is not a defendant in this lawsuit. But he will be defending himself and the Texas Association of Business in a separate suit involving similar allegations about illegal corporate money spent in the 2002 elections. (His attorney sat in the courtroom taking notes.) And while no one from the Texas Association of Business has been indicted, they are not home free yet. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle is expected to hand down additional indictments before the criminal trial, which is expected to begin sometime this summer. The D.A. is also looking into the TAB’s use of corporate money to fund mailings and issue ads that targeted Democratic candidates, while not overtly advocating the election or defeat of any specific candidate.

If the first day of this first trial provided any indication of what’s to come, the next six months will seem like an eternity for DeLay, even if he avoids indictment in Texas. Defense attorney Scarborough had it wrong. This is about DeLay. The Sugar Land, Texas, congressman who was known as “Hot Tub Tom” when he lived at Macho Manor, may not be in court in Austin, but the case — in fact the entire season of litigation — is all about him. “Tom DeLay was up to his eyeballs in it,” plaintiffs’ attorney Cris Feldman told National Public Radio reporter Wade Goodwyn a few days before the trial began. “It was Tom DeLay’s people, all the way down to his daughter, helping to run TRMPAC.”

In court Feldman was more specific, revealing for the first time that some of the corporate money, $25,000 to be precise, was handed directly to DeLay. In his opening statement, Feldman referred to a Reliant Resources lobbyist giving the House majority leader $25,000. In the plaintiffs’ exhibits is a letter (I found it in those exhibits six months ago) from Oklahoma-based Williams Companies conveying an additional $25,000 contribution — addressed to “Congressman Tom DeLay.” Williams is one of eight corporations indicted by the Austin D.A. Reliant was not indicted but is accused by Earle of giving an illegal contribution to TRMPAC fundraiser Colyandro.

The first TRMPAC document in the plaintiffs’ PowerPoint presentation included DeLay’s name at the top of a list describing the TRMPAC team. DeLay was placed at fundraising events in San Antonio and Houston. Warren Robold, one of the three individuals indicted by the Austin D.A., was identified as part of “DeLay’s network in Washington, D.C.” A Union Pacific lobbyist “needed a DeLay person to accompany him when he handed out checks.” And Danni Ferro’s role as event coordinator for TRMPAC was described by counsel for both the plaintiffs and the defendant. Ferro is DeLay’s daughter.

Without Tom DeLay, Bill Ceverha and Bill Hammond wouldn’t be defending themselves in two separate lawsuits. And DeLay’s fundraisers in Austin wouldn’t be facing the prospect of prison sentences — one as long as 99 years. “DeLay is wrapped up in the fact pattern of the case,” Feldman said during an afternoon break. “You can’t explain what happened without including him.” It is still possible that the Travis County D.A. and grand jury will include DeLay in a second round of indictments expected to come down later this spring.

This civil suit and the criminal case to come are all tied to DeLay’s calculated and successful attempt to win a GOP majority in the Texas House, where a Republican speaker would follow DeLay’s lead and redraw the state’s congressional lines. (Texas sent six new Republicans to Congress in the last election, expanding the party’s narrow majority there.)

DeLay’s problems have been easier to manage in Washington. After he was admonished three times by the House Ethics Committee, DeLay and Speaker Dennis Hastert replaced the Republican committee chairman, Colorado’s Joel Hefley, and added two new members to the committee, both of whom had made contributions to DeLay’s legal defense fund. While stacking the deck, the House leadership also rewrote the committee’s rules, ending the practice of automatically beginning an investigation 45 days after a complaint is filed. Investigations now require a majority vote, and the Ethics Committee is the only committee in the House that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

It won’t be so easy to game the system in Austin. In 28 years in office, D.A. Earle, a Democrat, has built a career on prosecuting political corruption — mostly targeting members of his own party. He hasn’t faltered under constant public attacks from Republican legislators in Texas, who have threatened to cut the funds for his Public Integrity Unit. And he has taken his fight to the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times when Republicans in Congress have criticized him.

On the stand Monday the avuncular Ceverha used the Bernie Ebbers (former WorldCom CEO) defense, pleading ignorance of the day-to-day operations of the organization he directed. Decisions were made by DeLay’s handpicked operatives, Ceverha insisted; he had nothing to do with running the PAC while he served as treasurer. (Much of his defense was a calculated attempt to hold the already indicted Colyandro responsible for most of the PAC’s decisions.) The argument was credible. After all, the most culpable defendants had managed to avoid their day in court by getting themselves indicted on criminal charges. Their day will probably occur sometime this summer.

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

The charges arose after DeLay set up a PAC to funnel corporate money, which is barred in Texas elections, to candidates for the state legislature. The group raised $190,000 and funneled it through the national Republican Party, which then distributed the money to several state-level candidates in Texas.

To learn more about the case that brought DeLay down, I spoke with Lou Dubose, who co-authored “The Hammer,” a biography of DeLay. The former editor of the Texas Observer and the current editor of the Washington Spectator newsletter, Dubose covered the trial gavel to gavel in Austin. He was in the courtroom on Monday when DeLay gave a lengthy presentencing speech accusing prosecutors of having political motivations and claiming he had $10 million in legal bills. 

I asked Dubose whether DeLay, who is planning an appeal, will ever see the inside of a jail cell, and whether the former majority leader appears humbled by the ordeal of the trial.  The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you ever think that you would see this happen?

I really didn’t. This was a working class jury, and I think that made a huge difference.

What was the dynamic with the jury — why did that make a difference?

Gary Cobb, the assistant DA who tried the case, really dragged out the $50,000 checks and the flights on corporate jets with the same persons who had written the checks to DeLay’s PAC. The sort of life that Tom DeLay lived at the expense of the corporate lobby — I think that really made an impact. By their clothes and what we know about them, it was a real working-class jury.

Oddly enough, Tom DeLay spent the entire duration of the three-week trial in a motor home rather than the Four Seasons. He drove his motor coach over here and checked into a motor home park in south Austin, a long way from where he was playing golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Then there was also the fact of the way the DeLays dressed, the fact that Reverend Rick Scarborough was sitting behind them. There was a lot of bling there that these people on the jury didn’t have.

Was it possible to tell where the $190,000 ended up? Did it just go to the state GOP?

The money came back, and it went to the candidates in Texas for whom it was designated. The backstory, of course, is that the Republicans controlled everything in Texas but the statehouse. Therefore they could not control redistricting. So DeLay set this organization up in 2001 for the 2002 election and they had to win a majority in the house. They moved this $190,000 up to D.C. because they were specifically raising corporate money, which was easier to raise. They sent it to Washington with specific instructions to send it back to these designated candidates. The candidates got the checks in the exact amount of $190,000.

And DeLay personally raised the money?

Well, that was the question. He stayed in the background but the state proved that he was aware that that transaction had happened. He was probably involved in directing it, although they didn’t have direct testimony on that. They put the three men who did the money-laundering in a room together in Sugar Land, Texas, in DeLay’s district, before the transaction was made.

Remarkably, at one point in the trial, DeLay went out and talked to Laylan Copelin of the Austin American-Statesman, who is a really terrific reporter. And Laylan asked him if he could have stopped the transaction. And DeLay said, “I could have stopped it, but why would I?”

And that was used in the trial?

In the middle of the trial, the state called Laylan Copelin as a witness — really bizarre. He’d been sitting there most of the trial; two weeks into the trial they call him as a witness because of what DeLay had said. His story ran, and two days later he was on the stand testifying as to what he had been told.

So I think DeLay proved to be a terrible client for a storied criminal defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin. That said, the state did an incredible job putting on a case that had to be by nature largely circumstantial.

Do you think he will ever spend a day in jail?

No. Simply because the Court of Criminal Appeals is an elected court, it’s all Republican, it’s highly political. It’s known as a prosecutors’ court, but in this case I would bet that they’re going to rule for the defendant. The Third Court of Appeals, where the appeal will start, is also a Republican court.

What are the issues in the appeal?

These courts are going to have to find a creative way of setting Tom DeLay free. One argument that they once made that they might try to revive is that money-laundering didn’t apply to checks, it applied to cash. This involved checks. The problem with that at the appellate level is that there have been a number of convictions based on money laundering with checks. So are you going to overturn all these prior convictions in order to save Tom DeLay?

What is DeLay doing these days?

You know, nothing. He is struggling to remain relevant. DeLay was always the star at CPAC, the annual conservative conference in Washington. But he hasn’t been allowed to speak there. Two years ago at CPAC, he was trolling for interviews. At the last CPAC convention, he was shunned.

He’s become a pariah to the Republican Party, and I don’t quite understand why. The true believers hold him responsible, rightly, for the Bush Medicare prescription drug bill, which DeLay pushed through. But he’s of no use to them anymore, and he’s not wanted. So most of what he does is struggle to remain relevant, and he’s not. Dick DeGuerin, in his closing argument, said “This prosecution has rendered my client unemployable.” And to my knowledge, he’s not employed.

His media statements have been defiant, but has he changed?

I don’t think so. That’s what’s remarkable. This is the same Tom DeLay that I saw every day for a year and a half when I followed him in Washington. It seemed to me that it never occurred to him that he no longer had the power that he once exercised. He had no regrets — he’s the same guy, except that he’s driving in a motor home instead of sleeping in the Four Seasons.

“This is an abuse of power. It’s a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I’m very disappointed in the outcome,” DeLay told reporters outside the courtroom. He remains free on bond, and his sentencing was tentatively set to begin on Dec. 20.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname “the Hammer,” used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

DeLay and his attorneys maintained the former Houston-area congressman did nothing wrong as no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.

The verdict came after a three-week trial in which prosecutors presented more than 30 witnesses and volumes of e-mails and other documents. DeLay’s attorneys presented five witnesses.

Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can’t go directly to political campaigns.

Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay’s political power.

DeLay’s attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.

They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn’t prove he committed a crime, they said.

DeLay has chosen to have Senior Judge Pat Priest sentence him. He faces five years to life in prison on the money laundering charge and two to 20 years on the conspiracy charge. He also would be eligible for probation.

The 2005 criminal charges in Texas, as well as a separate federal investigation of DeLay’s ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ended his 22-year political career representing suburban Houston. The Justice Department probe into DeLay’s ties to Abramoff ended without any charges filed against DeLay.

Ellis and Colyandro, who face lesser charges, will be tried later.

Except for a 2009 appearance on ABC’s hit television show “Dancing With the Stars,” DeLay has been out of the spotlight since resigning from Congress in 2006. He now runs a consulting firm based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.