The Daily Background

The AP has a little fun with the Republicans’ complaints about the length of the various Democratic health care legislation:

Republicans love to get their hands on the Democrats’ health care legislation. They show it to the cameras at every opportunity, even piling one version on top of another to make a big pile look even bigger.

Although they complain they don’t have time to read all of it, they found the time to tape it together, page by page, so they could roll it up the steps of the Capitol like super-sized toilet paper and show how very long it is.

It surely is long. But, no, not longer than “War and Peace,” as they claim.

No one really expects brevity when reinventing something as complex and huge as the nation’s health insurance system, which accounts for one-sixth of the economy. Indeed, legislation of comparable size was used to redefine an area of much more limited federal responsibility, education. That was the No Child Left Behind Act from the agenda of Republican President George W. Bush.

Size only matters in the health care debate because Republicans have turned the length of the legislation into a symbol: Big, unwieldy bill means big, overreaching government. Even bigger when you display double-spaced copies with double-wide margins and large print.

They also note that the final version of the Reid bill is only 206 pages (or, less than one-fifth of the length of the new Stephen King novel, which plenty of Americans are having no trouble at all gobbling down right now).

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