The Senate is expected to take its first procedural vote this week on the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill. Aside from its specific provisions, an important characteristic of such "comprehensive" legislation is its size. At 209,000 words in 1,077 pages, the legislation is almost impossible for even the educated layman to comprehend, rendering it inherently undemocratic.
To provide an sense of how long the bill is, here are a few comparisons:
- 27 times longer than the Constitution (7,600 words)
- 14 times longer than the Social Security Act of 1935 (15,000 words)
- 28 times longer than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (7,300), which ushered in the modern immigration era
- 5 times longer than the last big amnesty law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (42,000)
- Longer than the New Testament (180,000)
- Longer than the Torah (156,000)
- More than twice as long as the Koran (77,000)
- Twice the length of Orwell's 1984 (89,000)
- Longer than Homer's Iliad (150,000)
- About the same length as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
- End-to-end, the pages would stretch more than three football fields, be taller than the Washington Monument, and nearly as tall as New York's Chrysler Building
- Reading it aloud, at 120 words per minute, would take 29 straight hours.