Friday, February 17, 2006

What's wurst, sausage making or lawmaking?

Guest opinion by The Associated Press


By ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOISE — It's getting more difficult to tell the difference between lawmakers and sausage makers in the 2006 Idaho Legislature.

References to the two are popping up with increasing frequency in the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee, the House Revenue and Taxation Committee and elsewhere, as Senate and House members grapple with unwieldy legislation involving agency budgets, sex offenders and property taxes.

Case in point: During a House tax committee session Monday, Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d'Alene, found striking similarities between the apparently dicey business of assembling a tube steak and a bill to shift $125 million in property taxes to the state general fund.

"They always say making legislation is like making sausage," Sayler said. "If I'm going to be making sausage, I want to be making very sure I'm using the right ingredients."

For the record, we can thank Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia from 1871 to 1890, for the sentiment, "The people sleep better when they know neither how laws nor sausages are made."

But are Idaho lawmakers butchering Bismarck's original meaning?

At least partly, according to experts on 19th-century German politics.

It wasn't the inherently messy nature of making laws — or stuffing leftover pig and cow bits into an intestine — that the "Iron Chancellor" was commenting on, says Uta Poiger, a University of Washington history professor in Seattle.

Rather, he'd come up with the saying while waging a fight against liberal or socialist tendencies he feared could undermine his control of parliament. Bismarck was an archconservative who preferred the "average citizen" be excluded from decision making, in part to hamper proponents of change from rivaling his own authority, Poiger said.

"It's much more about who gets to make the sausage, rather than the messiness of the process," she said.

Over the years, only the partial meaning has survived, said David Clay Large, a German history professor and author at Montana State University in Bozeman, Mont.: Making laws and sausage are both unsightly affairs.

"There is a lot of blood on the floor," Large said. But "for Bismarck, lawmaking was not a thing people should really have any interest in. He had a pretty condescending view toward the public."

Either way, Idaho lawmakers love the expression.

"It's been a good one to use," said Rep. Wendy Jaquet, D-Ketchum. "It's been a pretty messy year."

Tax committee members have even put a personal spin on it.

On Monday, for instance, Rep. Dolores Crow, R-Nampa, conjectured that foot-dragging in the debate over property tax reform would push the end of the 2006 session further into the season than most would like — especially in an election year.

"I think it's going to be summer sausage," Crow told the panel.




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