The Senate joined the House on Monday evening in passing a coronavirus relief and stimulus bill nearly 6,000 pages long.
Given that the standard ream of paper contains 500 pages and stands 2.5 inches tall, the total height of the bill is 2.5 feet.
The bill, which contains $900 billion in coronavirus spending and $1.4 trillion to fund the government, also contained a variety of provisions that had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, and were inserted to benefit special interests.
As Breitbart News noted earlier:
The bill, which included $1.4 trillion in stopgap spending to prevent a government shutdown, was ostensibly the result of bipartisan negotiations that reached an agreement less than 24 hours before. It includes $600 stimulus checks for American households and a temporary expansion of federal unemployment benefits by $300, half the amounts paid earlier this year.
But the legislation also includes many hidden provisions completely unrelated to coronavirus, many of which appear to be the work of individual legislators, acting at the behest of specific lobbyists and interest groups who seized the opportunity.
The bill includes tax benefits for racehorse owners; hundreds of millions of dollars in economic aid to the Palestinians; and a congressional statement on U.S. policy on the succession of the Dalai Lama in Tibet, among many other obscure provisions.
Given six hours between the release of the bill, and an average reading pace of roughly 5 minutes per page of technical material, members of Congress could have been expected to read about 72 pages, assuming no meals or bathroom breaks.
The Senate vote was 91-7. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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