It's all meat to Congress: The sausage-making behind the U.S. budget deal grinds up health care policy, wolves and wilderness

Oregonian argues that attaching policy riders to must-pass budget bills is no way to run a government

The split-the-difference budget that swept through the House and Senate Thursday averted a government shutdown. But the bill, larded with policy riders, is a lousy way to run a government.

Backroom negotiations that should have been about this country's precarious federal budget, and little else, instead were a free for all for lobbyists and partisan lawmakers to pursue their own agendas: attacking Planned Parenthood, blocking desert wilderness, gutting environmental regulations and stripping wolves of Endangered Species Act protections. As a bonus, they got to do all of it in secret.

So no one has to step forward and take responsibility for the middle-of-the-night killing of a free-choice health insurance program that Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., worked long and hard to get into federal health reform, only to be surprised by a call from Senate President Harry Reid saying the program was dead, hurled under the bus during the budget negotiations. So much for the 300,000 Americans who would have found more affordable coverage under the program.

Never before has Congress simply decided that an animal listed under the Endangered Species Act no longer deserves those protections. At the very least, lawmakers should have held a stand-alone debate on wolves. By tacking the issue to the budget bill, they've encouraged future lawmakers who have a problem with a species -- say a certain owl -- to go hunting for a solution in the budget reconciliation process.

You're going to hear, of course, that this congressional sausage making is just the way of Washington and it is silly or naive to complain or expect anything different.

Well, yes, a pure, all-meat debate over the budget is unlikely, but if Americans keep averting their eyes -- and reaching for the mustard -- who knows what will get ground up and tossed in, or out, of the next congressional budget?