AUSTIN, Texas — The late H.L. Hunt was one of the battiest billionaires this state ever produced. The old trigamist (one better than a bigamist) used to crawl around his Dallas mansion, a replica of Mount Vernon, spouting John Birch drivel. He thought that crawling was good for the back.

In addition to spreading the word that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a commie, funding extremist radio programs like "Life Line" and making other ineffable contributions to the national mental health, H.L. also wrote a utopian novel outlining his vision of what America should be. In it, he proposed that rich people should have more votes than poor people. In fact, the richer a person was, the more votes he should be entitled to, thus making H.L.'s votes approximately equal to those of greater Houston.

Think how pleased the preposterous old crackpot would have been by our current political system.

True, we still cling to the fig leaf of one person, one vote, but what fool of a Common Man thinks he has as much political influence as, say, United Parcel Service, whose political action committee has given $3.5 million to federal candidates during the past three years and was the top contributor to the GOP in 1995?

UPS is particularly anxious to repeal federal workplace safety regulations. To that end, it maintains an elegant townhouse on Capitol Hill in Washington. Lawmakers stroll over a couple of times a week at breakfast, lunch or cocktail hour to meet with UPS lobbyists, and with the conversation comes a check for as much as $4,500, according to an Associated Press article by Jim Drinkard. Of course it's not a bribe! It's legal. It's a campaign contribution. Surely you see the difference. As a UPS spokeswoman told the AP, "It's our way to have a more personal chance to spend time with the member. It's convenient."

In their book "Tell Newt to Shut Up!" — an account of the Gingrich revolution that is both delicious and appalling — David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf detail the fund-raising machine set up by congressional Republicans. "Awesome" is the only word for it. Chilling, but awesome.

The R's greatly outspent the D's to retain their majorities in Congress this year. These are the people we now depend upon to give us campaign finance reform in the 105th Congress. (The number of campaign finance reform bills killed by those same majorities during the 104th Congress, according to Harper's Index: 92.)

In one of those delirious ironies in which Washington specializes, the new chairman of the House Government Reform committee is Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.). Brother Burton is such a noted reformer that he voted against the ban on gifts to legislators from lobbyists. In fact, he crusaded to let members keep getting free vacation trips, free golf trips and high-priced meals from lobbyists.

Burton will be conducting hearings come January on the terrible mess in campaign financing; this is the best news since the R's put Sen. Al D'Amato in charge of the ethics investigation. Burton has soberly vowed to carry out a responsible investigation of ... the Clinton administration, of course. For this purpose, according to Roll Call, Burton has hired as his chief investigator one David Bossie, a professional anti-Clinton hatchet man who has already leaked confidential phone logs acquired for the committee to the media. Putting Burton is charge of government reform is the Washington version of a cruelty joke. How much fun can one country have?

I keep coming back to the way campaigns are financed because it really is the root of the rot in our politics. Until we change this system of legalized bribery, our government won't be run by the people's representatives — it will continue to belong to the special interests that pay for their campaigns. And I am now persuaded that even the one real "mandate" out of this election — the people's clear disgust with the current system — is not going to be fixed by those who have benefited most from it. (Of course, I'm always willing to be pleasantly surprised by that noted reformer, Dan Burton.)

This is a fight that the people themselves will have to take on. Happily, I predict that it will be less difficult than many reformers fear. Retiring Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey has suggested that it will require a constitutional amendment because of the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley vs. Valeo. But according to constitutional law professor Scott Powe of the University of Texas at Austin, nothing in Buckley vs. Valeo prohibits public campaign financing, nor does it prevent attaching public funding to spending limits. Both are clearly constitutional.

The need for reform could not possibly be more urgent or more clear. As of now, we have replaced democracy with the cynic's version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold rules.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.