AND I THOUGHT the House was making radical changes.

When it comes to the emerging legislative sport of keeping law-making separate from budget-writing, the House has nothing on the Senate Finance Committee.

That’s a good thing, even if it does make budget debate a lot less interesting. The best way to end up with bad laws is for legislators to sneak them into the budget bill. With hundreds of pages of provisos — instructions to state agencies on how to spend money — it’s too intimidating for most people even to try to digest.

I can’t tell you how many provisos the Finance Committee amended or added to its version of next year’s budget, which the full Senate begins debating this morning. It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway through my review that I should have been keeping a count; that’s when the paucity of change began to register. But it seemed more than a little pedantic to spend the time going back and counting, so I called my senator, John Courson, who’s a senior member of the committee. He confirmed my impression.

It wasn’t just the low number of provisos that was remarkable, but the fact that most of them weren’t particularly remarkable.

The way I figure it, senators must have been too wiped out from all their property tax gymnastics to get into the kind of mischief that the Senate of days past raised to a high art. (Think video poker.)

Sen. Courson adds two other factors: Republicans have curtailed the practice from Democratic days of using the budget as a vehicle to pass controversial laws that can’t stand on their own. And Gov. Mark Sanford has “sent a message that he has no problem using his veto pen, so a lot of people who may think, ‘Gosh, this is a great way to sneak something in,’ they know it’s going to be vetoed.”

While the Legislature can be counted on to override most of Mr. Sanford’s budget vetoes, those vetoes still shine a spotlight on changes lawmakers prefer to keep in the shadows.

That’s not to say there’s nothing interesting or important in the Finance Committee’s provisos.

The two most significant changes — one good, one bad — delete items the House passed.

The good change is to get rid of the college tuition cap.

The bad change is to take away language to let the Department of Mental Health keep the proceeds from the sale of the State Hospital. The House proviso could have quickened a court review of the sale, thus speeding along the sale itself.

In conjunction with that, the panel eliminated a plan to use proceeds from the State Hospital to pay for intensive treatment for young children with autism; instead, that will be paid for with surplus funds — still an unstable source, but not quite as temporary as the House’s solution. But the committee also spends less than half what the House budgeted.

The most interesting provisos in the committee bill deal with the Budget and Control Board, which is one of Mr. Sanford’s favorite points of conflict with the Legislature.

One proviso eliminates language that allows the board to realign its divisions; and just to make sure there’s no confusion, it adds language specifically requiring the board to get legislative approval for “any reorganization or restructuring between divisions.” It goes on to require prior legislative approval for any layoffs.

In other words, it’ll now take an act of the Legislature to move the mail room from one office of this massive agency to another. And if the economy tanks and we have mid-year budget cuts when the Legislature’s out of town, this agency would have to go into debt rather than laying anyone off.

This would be legislative meddling aplenty if the Budget and Control Board were a regular state agency. It’s not. It’s controlled by a five-member board: the governor, the comptroller general, the treasurer and — get this — the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees.

Despite the fact that legislators have two-fifths of the votes on this executive agency — and the fact that Treasurer Grady Patterson routinely sides with those legislators to outvote Mr. Sanford and Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom — one observer told me with a straight face that the idea behind all of the Budget and Control Board provisos was to “give the Legislature more control” over the agency.

That brings me to the Finance Committee’s piece de resistance: a study of the “usefulness, effectiveness, and constitutionality of the State Budget and Control Board.” For a split second when I first read this, I thought a coup had brought to power someone who believes in government accountability — not to mention constitutionality and functionality.

Then I read the next sentence.

The study would be conducted by a panel appointed by the governor, the treasurer, the comptroller general, the chairmen of the legislative budget committees, and the chief justice. Best-case scenario, this is a whitewash. Worst-case: I can just see that gang locking Chief Justice Jean Toal in a room and explaining to her how vitally important the constitutionality of the Budget and Control Board is to continued funding of the judiciary.

I suppose it’s good to know that some things never change.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.