House Passes 5593 Page Stimulus Bill Without Anyone Having Read It

In the immortal words of Nancy Pelosi: “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”

Because, as Utah Senator Mike Lee so rambunctiously pointed out tonight, the bill is so huge that Lee said it will take three hours just to print out. And they’ll still have to vote on the bill tonight. It’s unreal.

1/4 This is the spending bill under consideration in Congress today. I received it just moments ago, and will likely be asked to vote on it late tonight. It’s 5,593 pages long. I know there are some good things in it. I’m equally confident that there are bad things in it. pic.twitter.com/SoWXnEWYfV

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) December 21, 2020

Lee noted that “this is by far the longest bill I’ve ever seen,” and added that members won’t be allowed to amend the bill in any way:

Here’s the really sad thing: we’re being told that there will be no opportunity to amend or improve it.

As a result, nearly every member of Congress – House and Senate, Democrat or Republican – will have been excluded from the process of developing this bill, which will cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

This process, by which members of Congress are asked to defer blindly to legislation negotiated entirely in secret by four of their colleagues, must come to an end.

It won’t come to an end until no longer works for those empowered by it. That can happen, but only when most members of both houses and both political parties stop voting for bills they haven’t read—and, by design, cannot read until after it’s too late.

And so it came to pass that the House passed the bill… without a single member possibly being capable of reading it:

*HOUSE HAS VOTES TO PASS COVID RELIEF-FUNDING BILL; VOTE ONGOING

And in case you wondered just what is in it, we summarized the most egregious pork here… and what needy Americans will care about here.

* * *

Earlier:

There was some confusion on Monday afternoon when the release of the full text of the stimulus bill was prevented due to a computer glitch, because the file was – no joke – corrupt.

It’s worse than printer delays.

They cannot get the Covid relief/govt funding bill uploaded to the internet. the computers keep bugging out, several sources told me. have heard about a corrupt file in education piece of the bill.

all sections need to be combined into 1 file

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 21, 2020

But that was promptly resolved (we can only hope the hacked password wasn’t Pork123), and moments ago Congress released the full text of the bill… all 5593 pages of it.

It’s worse than printer delays.

They cannot get the Covid relief/govt funding bill uploaded to the internet. the computers keep bugging out, several sources told me. have heard about a corrupt file in education piece of the bill.

all sections need to be combined into 1 file

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 21, 2020