I think its quite understandable that they have the deliberations in private. Imagine if your customers saw every minute of your office's day. What irks me is that although bills are available, they are available in such a way that it is a fulltime job to even look for things of interest. With better machine-searchable formats, you could set up alerts for potentially interesting sub-components of legislation that is up for debate.

Edit: I don't endorse some skeevy lobbying activities, but that isn't the only influence, and there are some legitimately difficult choices that our reps make (when they're working right... so I guess rarely) that they believe are in the best interest of the country and their constituents. Many of these decisions would be made even more difficult and actually discourage much of what thoughtful and earnest decision making does exist.