Wednesday, October 22, 2003; Page A28

LATE MONDAY AFTERNOON, the House was poised to vote on an energy bill purported to be 1,700 pages long. No Democrats, and few Republicans, had read the bill. A dispute among House and Senate negotiators on a tax issue delayed the vote, but it is expected in a few days. Before then it might be worth thinking about how this legislation came into existence -- and what that story says about the deeper problems of the legislative process itself.

The House and Senate each passed versions of this bill. But the final version has been written by a House-Senate conference committee that formally excluded Democrats. Although many of the issues addressed in the bill have been discussed in the hundreds of hours Congress has spent debating energy in the past two years (or even, in the case of the electricity provisions, the past decade), some of the final language will never have appeared anywhere in public. Much of the conference negotiating has involved attempts to buy off wavering members with pork: At the moment, there are rumors of a deal that would give massive amounts of money to coal-mining states with Democratic senators, in an attempt to get them to vote for the bill even if it does, in the end, allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Yet whatever the final contents of this mystery bill, it cannot, once the conference has signed off on it, be amended. Members who may have had only the briefest acquaintance with this complex piece of legislation -- every line of which has political, economic and environmental implications -- will be forced to vote yes or no. Some Republicans have hinted that they might generously allow some Democrats a full 24 hours to review the legislation. In the context of this bill, that offer is risible.

It is true, as Republicans say, that they are not the first to distort the legislative process. Opposition politicians have been cut out of conferences. Thick bills full of arcane language have passed Congress without much examination. Certainly pork has been added to make bills more palatable. Yet just as certainly it's all gotten worse. An occasional illness has become a chronic disease. Tactics once considered egregious have become ordinary.

This is true, most of all, for the conference system. Republicans point out that they supplied Democratic colleagues with draft versions of at least parts of the energy bill. But receiving an early version of something that probably will be changed is not the same as participating in a debate. Nor are informal consultations with Democratic colleagues an acceptable substitute for attendance at formal meetings. In fact, such informal, private conversations can result in private deals and provisions benefiting particular regions or interests, provisions that no one else even knows exist.

Deterioration of the formal systems and accepted civilities of Congress helps no one. Neither the energy bill nor the Medicare bill, which is also under negotiation, has been improved by a secretive, lengthy process. Both will be laden with perks and pork, both will fall short of achieving necessary changes, and both may even deepen the problems they were meant to solve. When Democratic staff members are forced to ask lobbyists what's in a bill, because Republicans won't tell them, the atmosphere in Congress isn't improved either. This nation is too closely divided for House Republicans to call Democrats "irrelevant," as one did in a Post article last week. At the moment, the breakdown in civility is hurting the Democrats most. If the tables turn, as someday they might, the Republicans will be injured. In either case, the country loses.