Sen. Tom Coburn will post bill views on Web

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans want to spend weeks debating the health care bill, but they didn’t want to spend days next week having the 2,074-page document read aloud, as U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn had threatened.

Though Coburn had to drop that plan, the Oklahoma Republican said he still plans to post a section-by-section explanation of the legislation on his Senate Web site. If the health care debate lasts for weeks in the Senate, there could still be opportunities for Coburn, R-Tulsa, or other Republicans to insist on a lot of reading aloud.

Coburn said in an interview last week that he plans to be on the Senate floor fighting to change the Democrats’ health insurance reform legislation, though he predicted Democrats ultimately will prevail in votes.

"I think they’re going to win,” he said.

But if Democrats are going to score a victory, Republicans want to make them work hard for it.

"Be prepared to debate the health care bill for a very, very long time,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said on the Senate floor last week.

Coburn had been planning for weeks to require that the entire bill be read aloud on the Senate floor. Reading bills is routinely waived, without objection, but Coburn had vowed publicly to insist on a page-by-page recitation. It was expected to take somewhere between 35 and 50 hours to read the entire bill.

But Coburn switched gears at the behest of his Republican colleagues because of the complex procedural and political maneuvering in the early rounds of the fight.

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