On 12/20/2022, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) was joined by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), , Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in a press conference to oppose the $1.7 trillion, 4,000+ page omnibus spending bill and argue in favor of additional amendments. Senator Lee said, “4155 pages long just put this in perspective for a minute. I speak on average uh about 120 words per minute when I speak on the senate floor. I don’t know whether that’s something to be proud of or or not. I don’t know how that stacks up to others but that’s the rate at which I typically speak on the senate floor. At that pace it would take me five straight days and by days I don’t mean eight hour work days or 10 or 12 hour work days I mean 24-hour work days five straight 24-hour periods consecutively back to back without so much as a bathroom break and certainly no opportunity for sleeping nothing other than reading take five straight consecutive days of continuous reading at that pace in order to get through this.”
Sen. Lee discussed the length of the omnibus bill and compared it to reading the Bible, noting that it was “4,155 pages long.” Lee said, “The Bible is a long book and it’s 1,200 pages long. And so going through this, reading through this, which the Bible is actually interesting and full of stories that you can follow, much more interesting than this. I mean, even when you get into the depths of Habakkuk, you’re not dealing with stuff like this. But you’d have to read, to get through the same amount of text, you’d have to read the Bible three and a half times during that same period and be able to comprehend it. And unlike the Bible, this stuff can’t be really read on its face and understood. It takes cross-referencing to understand all of that.”
Sen. Lee compared the proposed $1.7 trillion federal spending bill to a jar of Prego sauce—“because everything is in it.” He said, “Ladies and gentlemen this is why we’re 31 trillion dollars in debt because of stuff like this it’s making the American people poorer it’s destabilizing our economy it’s making it so that the average Utah family now finds life unaffordable having to shell out an additional 1 000 a month every single month for their basic monthly necessities this is wrong it’s got to stop and it will not stop until members of congress including U.S senators elected as republicans committed to some semblance of fiscal conservatism refused to vote for bills that they have not read that they do not understand that are cobbled together and that impoverish the American people they do a lot of good but most of that good is for special interests and for the popularity of the politicians who vote for these things who will get a big bump for the moment when they get praised by the public and by the media and by the special interests for passing this thing it needs to stop.”
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Omnibus spending bill: take five 24-hour work days to read 4155 pages, Bible only 1200 pages long