Congress Needs A Version Control System?

Funny. Tim O'Reilly applies some thinking about version control in software to Congress and the sausage making .... er... bribery machine... er... legislative process.

They say you don't want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

Sure it would be nice, but hey, that would destroy democracy as we know it. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.