AUSTIN, TEXAS — One of the strangest legislative endgames in history is now being fought out late at night, night after night, to determine whether representative democracy will continue to exist or we just give up and admit that this country is a corporate oligarchy.

You can see it on C-SPAN's late-late show; the great campaign-finance reform debate of 1998 is just peachy for night owls, insomniacs, second-shift cops and jazz musicians getting off their gigs. Those of you following baseball this year might want to switch over after those extra-inning games to catch the action on the House floor. It's not a bad show at times.

As campaign-reform buffs know, our bill is like one of those old-timey heroines lampooned in cartoons, and they have tied her to the railroad tracks AGAIN. The train coming at her used to have 258 cars behind it, in the form of crippling amendments, but those have now been whittled down to a relatively merciful 55. She could be mashed flatter than a pancake by any one of them, but so far our Dudley Dorights (led by Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., and Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass.) have been knocking off those big, heavy cars one by one.

However, the Snidely Whiplash villains (led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas), twirling their black mustaches, have also put up 10 other so-called campaign-reform proposals in hopes that the good guys will get confused — or, more precisely, so that Republicans can vote for something called campaign-finance reform, thus pretending they're on the Dudley Doright side, while actually helping the villainous Snidely Whiplashes of the piece.

OK, so it's a bit of an oversimplification — but not much, believe me. And we're getting some top-notch dialogue in this melodrama.

Our Man Shays blurted out one recent night that political parties are shaking down corporations for unregulated soft money. DeLay promptly demanded that Shays define "shakedown."

"Shakedown," replied Shays, according to The New York Times, "is when leaders from both parties will call up a corporation president and say, 'We would like $100,000 or $200,000 or half a million,' and make it very clear to those leaders that they can expect no action on their legislation unless they get it."

"Would the gentleman like to name the members that do it?" asked DeLay.

Shays snapped, "Do not even wonder for a minute about whether I will be able to document that information."

That may not be as zippy as a passage from "Lethal Weapon 4," but since DeLay himself is known as "The Hammer" and is notorious for his rough fund-raising tactics — including keeping lists of which lobbyists contribute to what party and even demanding that corporations hire Republican lobbyists — that was as clear a brush-back pitch as you'll ever see in politics.

In one of the more hilarious subplots of the drama, the villains are pretending to be defenders of free speech by night, using the simple-minded ruse that unlimited campaign donations (also known as legalized bribes) are somehow the same thing as free speech. These are the same knotheads who spend their daylight hours trying to pass a flag-burning amendment, something that actually would harm free speech. It reminds me of "Dr. Dirt — professor by day, pornographer by night."

(For those who think flag-burning is not political expression, I remind you that one of the most famous photographs of the 1960s: that of he black veteran in Harlem who took his American flag out on the street and burned it with tears running down his face the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That, friends, is political speech.)

Another delicious exercise in bald, two-faced hypocrisy was The Hammer's use of a blow-up poster of Veep Al Gore at the infamous Buddhist temple fund-raiser. Now get this: Here's DeLay doing everything he possibly can to kill off campaign-finance reform, a man who has openly invited favored lobbyists to write legislation deregulating their own industries, and he's trying to use this debate to point out that Democrats have abused the very system he is refusing to do anything to fix. Piece of work, that boy.

All this would be just one more piece of summer entertainment — sort of a cross between "Godzilla" and "Armageddon" — if this weren't real life and real stakes and real people getting screwed by a campaign-finance system that buys special-interest legislation through Congress almost daily, while the people's interests are represented by practically no one. We owe a special debt of gratitude to those courageous Republicans who are defying their own leadership to end soft money.

Since I actually like politicians (a position so fantastically unfashionable that I'm thinking of taking up some more popular perversion, such as inter-species dating), I occasionally remind people that most folks in public life, no matter what you think of them, did not actually set out to become whores. In private, most of them loathe the system that makes them spend almost half their time kissing the behinds of big corporate PAC-meisters.

This is their chance to change that — all they need is the courage.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.