THROUGH FIVE YEARS of debate and non-debate and negotiations and stalls, cynics have charged that the House's enthusiastic support of campaign finance reform had less to do with principle than with sticking it to the Democrats. They've charged that the Senate never wanted any type of reform, but worked very hard to make it look like senators were supporting reform, while stopping just short of allowing it to happen, to avoid owning up publicly to their opposition.

Finally, it's put up or shut up time, time for senators and representatives to prove the cynics wrong.

The House has passed a respectable bill, the Senate has amended it with the best campaign finance reform bill we've seen in South Carolina (and kudos to senators for forcing the issue, rather than playing the usual legislative game of chicken to see who would give in first and pass the other body's bill), and negotiators have been named from both sides. They should make quick work of ensuring that voters aren't kept in the dark in future elections as to who is underwriting the campaigns.

Both sides say they want the same thing: to force disclosure. While both likely would accomplish that in terms of political parties, the Senate's language is far more likely to do the trick with so-called independent expenditures. It goes beyond the House's provision of requiring anyone who spends $500 or more to influence our vote to report that. It actually spells out what that means, in a way that even the Ethics Commission can't misinterpret out of existence; it smartly borrows language from federal law to include people who run clever ads designed to get around formulaic laws that only counted campaign ads as campaign ads if they used such "magic words" as "Elect Joe Smith" or "Defeat Susan Jones."

The Senate bill adds several nice provisions: It lets courts stop abuses of the campaign law during the crucial final 50 days of a campaign, when the Ethics Commission is barred from acting. It requires the state to begin electronic filing of campaign finance reports, so the public can easily review the information. It requires candidates to report their donors' occupations, so we can keep up with industry attempts to influence them. And it makes candidates responsible for committees that act at their direction or use their names. The House has supported many of these provisions in the past; it should do so again.

The Senate bill also doubles, to $50 a day, the amount of money special interests can spend on legislators and expands the circumstances under which that entertaining can be done. These changes certainly are not needed; senators should be willing to do without them in return for the House accepting the rest of their bill. But any damage they might do (and the damage is more symbolic than substantive) would be minuscule compared to the good the overall legislation would do.

There will be calls for the Legislature to delay action until the U.S. Supreme Court rules, probably later this year, on the constitutionality of the federal McCain-Feingold law. That's uncalled-for. While this bill does borrow some language from that law, it does so to a different effect -- not banning the defined activities but merely requiring they be reported, as most states already do. And delays come at a price: The sooner this bill passes, the more likely that at least some parts of it -- and perhaps all of it -- can apply to next year's elections, rather than waiting until 2006. We've already waited more than four years. That's long enough.