You may have seen a senator on CSPAN ask for unanimous consent to dispense with the reading of a bill and consider the bill as read. The key term there is ‘unanimous consent.’ Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma intends to deny his consent for this on the health care bill. He wants the clerk to read the entire bill, which will be over 1,000 pages. That’s his right, but he needs to keep his Republican colleagues on the floor at all times to prevent a motion from passing to end the reading of the bill. Coburn isn’t actually that popular with his own caucus. For example, he introduced a motion to recommit the military construction appropriations bill yesterday, and he only got 24 votes for it (including Evan Bayh and Claire McCaskill). So, not including himself, Coburn only won 21 Republican votes for his motion, with 19 Republicans telling him to mind his manners. It’s a good question whether or not he’ll be able to intimidate his colleagues into spending their entire weekend on the Senate floor to assist him in what is really just a cheap stunt.
The idea, I guess, is that the American people will spend their weekend watching CSPAN, and they’ll get increasingly outraged at the size of the health care bill as the reading of it goes on and on and on. A more likely scenario is that the American people will only hear about this on the nightly news, and they’ll think Tom Coburn is an asshole. As for Coburn’s Republican colleagues, they already think that.
