(CNSNews.com) – The new federal spending bill proposed in the Republican-controlled Congress to fund the government through the end of September–which is now posted on the House Rules Committee website–is 1,665 pages long and includes an average of approximately 210 words per page.
That makes this bill approximately 350,000 words long—or about twice as long as the stimulus law (the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”) that President Barack Obama signed less than a month after his inauguration in 2009.
As CNSNews.com reported at the time, the House Appropriations Committee, in the then-Democrat-controlled Congress, released Obama’s stimulus bill in two PDFs less than 24 hours before the House was going to vote on it. One PDF was 575 pages long and the other was 496 pages long, making the entire stimulus when published in that form 1,071 pages.
In the format that the Government Printing Office eventually used to publish the final text of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” the law comprised a single PDF that was 407 pages long.
The pages in that PDF included an average of approximately 430 words each, making Obama’s stimulus law approximately 175,000 words long.
On the House floor this past Friday, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.) said that House Speaker Paul Ryan had told him that members would have 72 hours to read this new spending bill and that a vote would be held Thursday.
“I talked to the Speaker, Mr. Ryan, and to the majority leader standing right there on the floor just hours ago yesterday,” Hoyer said on Friday. “It is my understanding that the speaker’s intention is that we have a bill filed Monday night so, in the speaker’s words, we can give 72 hours to review that bill and then pass it on Thursday.”
To read all 1,665 pages of the bill over three full days, a member of Congress—or a citizen—would need to read 555 pages per day.
