Fat Chance Lawmakers Will Read Health Bill: Hoyer

House lawmakers may well be be voting before the end of summer on a momentous health-care reform bill. But that doesn't mean they're actually going to read the bill. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer laughed off the suggestion when CNS News posed it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” he said.

“I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill." The question came up because a conservative group in Delaware is circulating a pledge asking lawmakers to read the legislation in full before voting. “I think if the framers of our Constitution ever saw an entire legislative body vote on a 1,500-page bill that no one had read, they would shudder—if not go into fits of apoplexy," said the group's leader.
(More Steny Hoyer stories.)