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Paper WeightThe health care bill is more than 1,000 pages. Is that a lot?

By Christopher BeamPosted Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009, at 6:12 PM ET

With the debate over health care reform heating up, one peculiar criticism keeps surfacing: That the bill—or, at least, the House version—is too long. "I have a fundamental problem with any 1,000-page bills," said Sen. David Vitter, R-La., at a town hall meeting on Wednesday. Back in June, Newt Gingrich complained on Fox News that "[t]his bill is already 1,000 pages long." It's now 1,018 pages, to be exact—is that especially long for a bill?

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Not really. Sure, most legislation is much shorter: The average statute passed by the 109^th Congress—the latest session for which figures are available—clocked in at around 15 pages, according to the Senate Library. And the recent law authorizing President Obama to give gold medals to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the 40^th anniversary of the moon landing filled just two pages. But major spending bills frequently run more than 1,000. This year's stimulus bill was 1,100 pages. The climate bill that the House passed in June was 1,200 pages. Bill Clinton's 1993 health care plan was famously 1,342 pages long. Budget bills can run even longer: In 2007, President Bush's ran to 1,482 pages.

Over the last several decades, the number of bills passed by Congress has declined: In 1948, Congress passed 906 bills. In 2006, it passed only 482. At the same time, the total number of pages of legislation has gone up from slightly more than 2,000 pages in 1948 to more than 7,000 pages in 2006. (The average bill length increased over the same period from 2.5 pages to 15.2 pages.)

Bills are getting longer because they're getting harder to pass. Increased partisanship over the years has meant that the minority party is willing to do anything it can to block legislation—adding amendments, filibustering, or otherwise stalling the lawmaking process. As a result, the majority party feels the need to pack as much meat into a bill as it can—otherwise, the provisions might never get through. Another factor is that the federal government keeps expanding. Federal spending was about $2.7 trillion in 2007. That's up from $92 billion 50 years ago. And as new legislation is introduced, past laws need to be updated. The result: more pages.

Bonus Explainer: Do members of Congress actually read legislation? It depends. If a lawmaker is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, say, chances are he'll read all—or, at least, most—of a climate bill. But he probably would not read every last word of an education bill. Instead, he'd just read the parts that he considers important—perhaps because they're controversial. Furthermore, since bills often read like bureaucratic gibberish, lawmakers hire aides with various policy specialties to study the legislation in depth and summarize it. (The job of actually converting the policy ideas into legislative language goes to the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Counsel.) So when a lawmaker "reads" a bill, it's usually a combination of glossing summaries of the less important stuff and, when necessary, poring over the actual text to understand the more crucial bits.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Eric Lane of Hofstra University, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office. Thanks also to reader Jordan Goldmeier for asking the question.

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Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter. Follow him on Twitter.

COMMENTS

It may be worth point out that if you download a PDF of a congressional bill, how little verbiage is on each page. The fonts are fairly large, lines of text seem short and double-spaced seems to underestimate the whitespace between lines. I suspect that if they typed their pages out the way most of us are used to, the overall page count would drop at least 50%.

-- Lyger
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With everyone making a show of freaking out about the size of bills lately, you'd think some newsy person would mention that the margins are so big that each page has only a 4x9-inch space for the actual text. (Which, of course, is double-spaced.)

Because I am a total nerd, I just did a quick calculation: If they used 1-inch margins all around (which is standard in universities and is quite generous), that alone would shrink the 1018-page healthcare bill down to 626 pages. In other words, nearly 40% of the useable space is, er, intentionally left blank. (Won't somebody think of the trees?)

Plus, as anyone who's ever read a long bill (or any legal document, really) can tell you, there's skimmable content aplenty. Clearly, you're not going to read the tables of contents (there are several). You can skim the definitions. And you can all-but-ignore at least half of the introductory whereas-es.

-- karinova
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