For months now, Republicans have been trying to use the sheer number of pages it took to write Congress’s health-care-reform legislation as a scare tactic, even though logic would dictate that a bill reforming America’s vast and complex health-care system would, in fact, be quite large. Here are just a few select quotes:
“That’s larger than the novel ‘War and Peace.’” Senator Orrin Hatch, on the Senate bill
“All you need to know is there are 1,990 pages. That should tell you everything.” House Minority Leader John Boehner, on the House bill
”I have a fundamental problem with any 1,000-page bills.” Senator David Vitter
”I’ve sponsored nine bills … I don’t think any of them are 100 pages long.” Congressman Roy Blunt
”[I]f you can’t put this down in 30 pages or less, it proves that this is a complicated, you know, bunch of bureaucratic garbage.” Fox News host Sean Hannity
So it was a little weird today when Republican senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming said this on the Senate floor:
“And we talk about 2,074 pages, which seems like a lot. And it would be for a normal bill that you could debate in a limited period of time, which is what we’re being asked to do, but 2,074 pages isn’t nearly enough to cover health care for America.”
Whoops! As Woody Allen said to a dishonest friend in Manhattan, “You guys should get your story straight. Don’t you rehearse?”
Republicans now arguing that the Senate health care bill isn’t long enough. [Think Progress]
