The American Spectator

home
ADVERTISEMENT

The Spectacle Blog

Sen. Tom Coburn has just demanded that the Senate clerk read the single-payer amendment offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders -- and it's 767 pages.

Typically, Senators offering amendments will ask for unanimous consent to avoid reading the entire meausure, but all it takes is one Senator to object to demand its reading, and Coburn objected to Sanders attempt to dispense with the reading of the amendment.

To give you a sense of how this could delay things, it took the Senate clerk 18 minutes to get through the first 6 pages of the amendment, which were the table of contents. At this current pace, it will take 38 hours to get through the entire amendment.

You can follow along with the amendment here.

UPDATE: The body of the bill seems to be going faster than the table of contents, but it still looks likely to take at least 12 hours at this pace.

About the Author

Philip Klein is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent. You can follow him on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/Philipaklein

http://spectator.org/blog/2009/12/16/coburn-forces-reading-of-767-p

ADVERTISEMENT

SPONSORED LINKS

Special Feature

Better that we become a nation of choosers rather than beggars. Our symposium on choice from the May, 2012 issue:

A Time for Choosing

James Piereson

The Road from Serfdom

Stephen Moore and Peter Ferrara

FLASHBACK TO: 1984

Clip of the Day

ADVERTISEMENT