IN A DECADE and a half of watching the General Assembly, I've grown accustomed to thinking of the House as the progressive body, the body to turn to when you want good legislation passed. The Senate is the place where bills go to die.

Oh, the House could always be counted on to pass some really bad bills; that was when you had to grudgingly acknowledge that the Senate's obstinate defense of the status quo can come in handy.

But if you actually wanted something good to happen, as opposed to wanting to stop something bad from happening, the House was the place to look.

Until recently.

In the past three weeks, the Senate has supplanted the House (at least for the moment) as South Carolina's reform body, passing:

• A campaign finance reform bill that not only requires people to tell us when they spend money to influence our votes, but does so with language that is clear enough that it likely will be enforced. The House passed a bill with the same goal, but its vague language likely would be ignored by the State Ethics Commission or invalidated by the courts.

• A tough predatory lending bill that will classify some of the most unscrupulous practices of an unscrupulous industry as the criminal activities they are. The House passed some protections, but stopped short of what is needed.

• An overhaul of the Public Service Commission, which should lead to more capable commissioners and provide some independence for the staff that is supposed to represent the public interest. The House bill lets unqualified cronies keep making the decisions.

Meanwhile, Senate leaders are pushing an increase in our rock-bottom cigarette tax, which House leaders fought bitterly, in order to pay for our rock-bottom Medicaid program. (Of course, the Senate has always been more receptive to providing government services for the needy, and fewer of its members have abdicated their responsibility to think by signing no-new-taxes pledges promising never to do so.)

On top of that, Senate leaders sound at least as receptive -- and in some cases, even more so -- as House leaders when it comes to the most important idea likely to be considered in this decade: Gov. Mark Sanford's proposal to restructure state government to make it more functional, efficient and accountable.

This last development is nothing short of extraordinary. Few proposals have met with more disdain in the Senate than the idea of putting someone in charge of our disjointed government. In 1993, Senate leaders greeted the House's government restructuring bill with blue-and-white bumper stickers evoking their reputation for killing any good idea: "THE SENATE .‘.‘. Now More Than Ever!"

Of course, it's way too early to say what will actually happen with Mr. Sanford's proposals to let the governor govern the state. And it's important to note that when the Senate talks about government restructuring it doesn't always mean the same thing as the governor, the House or this editorial board. Take, for instance, the PSC bill: While it would greatly improve the current situation, it creates a whole new state agency, of which we have far too many; and in a state known for a crippling lack of accountability, it gives the director of that new agency more autonomy than Supreme Court justices.

But Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, who was the fiercest defender of the status quo a decade ago, today speaks matter-of-factly about converting constitutional officers to gubernatorial appointments. He reports having productive conversations with the governor's office, and has been circulating the governor's proposals among senators to determine where consensus exists. He is expected to sponsor many of the governor's proposals.

Sen. McConnell's interest seems to be such that the House -- whose leader, Speaker David Wilkins, co-chaired the panel that wrote the 1991 report around which Mr. Sanford's proposals are built -- could find itself responding to reform measures passed by the Senate, rather than the traditional other way around.

Sen. McConnell says simply that he has found Mr. Sanford a governor he can work with (left unsaid: unlike those who came before him) and that many of his ideas have merit. He explains the Senate's newfound proactivity by saying Republicans and Democrats are determined to work together; leaders meet weekly to figure out which bills they can get enough support to move forward on, and then do so.

What he doesn't say (it would be immodest) is that the change has less to do with bipartisanship -- which has always been a hallmark of the Senate -- than with the fact that the Senate has a leader now. Someone who is universally respected within the Senate is in a position to make things happen. And that someone has a strong reformist streak and a strong independent streak, which make progressive initiatives only natural.

Perhaps now that Sen. McConnell has taken on the demands of leadership, and been forced to get involved in all the issues before the Legislature, rather than simply cherry-picking those that interest him, he also has come to realize that government is too big to be run by a part-time Legislature. And, the choices being anarchy and gubernatorial control, perhaps he has chosen the latter. If so, we all will benefit.