"To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making."

  -- Otto von Bismarck.

That's a great quote. Seems like the original version is by John Godfrey Saxe though, and reads "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafir...

Even without the playback, if legislative documents were versioned and the revisions were public, we could at least watch the diffs and call people on the pork and poison pills they insert into bills.

That's actually a really good idea, even if all it showed you were successive drafts.

The lobbyists will have to start to use etherpad then.

I was thinking git would be a great tool for legislation writing as well...