This month, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., offered his farewell remarks to the Senate. When he originally planned the occasion, Frist was going to pass on the majority leadership to a fellow Republican and kick off his campaign for president.

Instead, Frist spoke to a Senate that’s about to become Democratic and – having already pulled the plug on his White House hopes – talked about returning to Tennessee to practice medicine.

But medicine helped bring Frist to this point. In March 2005, as part of the drive to block the removal of a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo after she’d spent years in a vegetative state, Frist offered a diagnosis on the Senate floor.

The heart surgeon declared he’d looked at videotape of Schiavo in her Florida hospice room and, “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

Actually – after the bill that Frist pushed through the Senate was dismissed by courts and Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed – an autopsy confirmed Schiavo’s vegetative state and blindness.

By that time, polls showed that people had already reached their own diagnosis of the Schiavo situation and of the efforts by Congress and the White House to take it over. By April, pollsters reported George W. Bush had reached his lowest approval levels ever – although now his levels of that time look stratospheric.

Still, Gallup showed that Bush’s approval-disapproval comparison had gotten 12 points worse since its previous poll, CBS found a drop of 10, Time magazine pegged it at 8.

These days, the Democratic sweep of last month’s elections is traced to Baghdad, to New Orleans neighborhoods that still look like parts of Baghdad and to Mark Foley’s curious dating habits. But looking back to a time when Karl Rove was supposed to be unstoppably building the permanent Republican majority, it seems the Schiavo episode was the moment when the signs started to point downward.

“Schiavo was the first expression that they had drunk the Kool-Aid, that they had completely surrendered to 10 percent of their base,” says Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. “The wheels came off then.”

The effort to prevent the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube began just as Congress was leaving on its two-week Easter vacation. The bill moved through the Senate, and the House GOP leadership tried to move it on the unanimous consent calendar, meaning a quorum of the House would not be needed. That Saturday, the leadership checked specifically with the Oregon delegation because of the state’s assisted-suicide law.

Only Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., was still in Washington, D.C., and he was just about to leave for the airport. But Wu declared he would object to unanimous consent – meaning, he recalled last week, that if the House leaders were going to do it, “they’re going to have to drag 218 of our sorry asses back there.” He canceled his travel plans and got on the phone and, by Sunday, seven Democrats were objecting.

On the now-necessary vote, the bill passed 203-58. To sign the bill, President Bush flew up from his ranch, which he had not done after the Southeast Asian tsunami – and would not do after Katrina.

On the floor, Wu warned, “By forcing this vote through Congress, the Republican leadership is demonstrating that no bedroom in America and no hospital room in this land is beyond the reach and power of this federal government. This is wrong.”

Politically, he wasn’t so sure. “I thought the Republicans were going to hand us our heads on the Schiavo matter,” he said recently.

But in two days, a CBS poll found that 82 percent of Americans thought the federal government should have stayed out of the issue. More than two-thirds of conservatives and evangelicals disapproved. Congress’ approval rating fell to 34 percent.

Two weeks later, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 18 percent of Republicans saying they had lost respect for Bush on the issue and 41 percent saying they’d lost respect for Congress.

And the “social issue,” previously considered an abortion/gay marriage slam dunk for the GOP, started to turn into something more about privacy and science, about medical care and stem-cell research, and about who gets to make decisions about people’s lives.

Last January, Frist – who by then knew the impact was bad but didn’t yet know how bad – said about the Schiavo case, “Well, I’ll tell you what I learned from it, which is obvious. The American people don’t want you involved in these decisions.”

Ten months later, it turned out many American voters didn’t want government involved in many decisions about how they live their lives.

And how they die their deaths.