AUSTIN, Texas » Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful Republican congressmen to emerge from this state, wanted to spend Tuesday cheering on his party and tracking the turnout in the election.

Instead, he spent the day in an annex at the Travis County Courthouse — next door to a polling place — facing trial on the money-laundering charges that derailed his career.

DeLay, the former House majority leader who resigned in September 2005 after being indicted, said it was difficult to listen to testimony about the inner workings of his political action committee eight years ago when his party appeared on the verge of a major victory in Texas and across the country.

"I was trying to get them to fix the computer monitors so I could see the news," he quipped during a lunch break about the computers on the defense table.

The one consolation, he said, was that he had been able to vote early in his hometown, Sugar Land.

Delay said the charges against him were "a political vendetta that has no substance of crime" and lamented the long delay in bringing the case to trial, during which he has been sidelined politically.

"Going through five years with this cloud hanging over your head is not easy," he said.

The trial is being closely watched by political operatives and campaign finance lawyers because it revolves around what prosecutors here describe as a common shell game in the financing of political campaigns: the practice of routing corporate donations through national political action committees to circumvent a Texas ban on corporate money in legislative races.

DeLay stands accused of conspiring with two associates — Jim Ellis and John Colyandro — to channel $190,000 in corporate donations gathered by one of his political action committees to seven Republican candidates for the state Legislature in the 2002 race.

Specifically, DeLay’s state committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, sent the corporate money to the Republican National Committee, which donated the same amount from a different account to the candidates, prosecutors say. Under Texas law, it is illegal for corporate donations to be used directly on campaigns, although they can be used for administrative costs.

Those donations helped Republicans take control of the Texas Legislature in 2002 and to elect the first Republican speaker since Reconstruction.

That majority allowed the Republicans to push through a contentious congressional redistricting plan, engineered by DeLay, that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress and ousted several powerful Democrats, which in turn strengthened DeLay’s stature, prosecutors said.

In his heyday, DeLay was one of the most polarizing and powerful Republicans in Congress. His political downfall began with the state indictment in 2005, coupled with a separate investigation by the Justice Department into DeLay’s ties to Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist convicted in connection with efforts to buy influence on Capitol Hill.

Federal prosecutors ended their inquiry in August without filing charges against DeLay.

DeLay’s defense team has argued that money transfers between committees are common and conform to the law, so long as the corporate money is kept in a separate account from the one used for donations to candidates.

"There is proof the corporate funds never came to Texas," DeLay’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, said.

But when DeGuerin made the same point in court Tuesday with the jury outside the room, Judge Pat Priest of state District Court roundly rejected it. He said that keeping corporate money separate mattered little if the state could prove there was a criminal intent to launder the money and turn it into political donations.

"I don’t care if you put it in one pocket and took money out of the other pocket," Priest said. "Money is absolutely fungible. It’s like beans."

On Monday, the jury heard opening arguments, and testimony from two advocates for fair elections who said they had filed complaints after they noticed the flow of corporate money from DeLay’s group to the Republican National Committee.

When testimony resumed on Election Day, the former treasurer of DeLay’s political action committee told jurors that DeLay’s committee regularly collected donations from corporations for administrative costs, but did not pass it on to candidates.

In the afternoon, jurors heard from DeLay’s daughter, Danielle DeLay Garcia, who ran his campaigns for a decade and simultaneously worked for his two main political action committees.

DeLay Garcia said Texans for a Republican Majority was set up in 2002 using as a model DeLay’s political action committee in Washington, Americans for a Republican Majority, which had been successful in increasing the Republican representation. The idea was to dislodge the Democrats from the state Legislature, she said, by raising money through trips and monthly dinners, sometimes from corporate donors.

"It was based on the same idea," she said.

Her testimony was to continue Wednesday.

As he left the courtroom, DeLay said he would watch the election returns in a hotel room. He predicted that Republicans would take back the House but perhaps not the Senate.

Then his smile faded, and he acknowledged an odd sense of detachment as witnesses went over details of fundraising for the 2002 election while his party was riding high in the current polling.

"It’s surreal," he said.