Immigration Bill Swells to Over One Thousand Pages

Immigration Bill Swells to Over One Thousand Pages

on Tue, 28 May 2013

The Senate Judiciary Committee has increased the already-sizable length of the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill to more than a thousand pages during the markup process, Breitbart News has learned.

The final length of the bill remained a mystery during its drafting process. Some estimates from media outlets, including from the Washington Post's David Nakamura, placed the bill length at the time at longer than 1,500 pages. Breitbart News also reported that estimate, as did many other media outlets.

When the bill came out at introduction just under a thousand pages, Gang of Eight members tried to attack the reputations of the media outlets that reported those initial numbers. Marco Rubioattacked those who reported on the estimates of the bill’s length in a press release.

Rubio said The Daily Caller’s Neil Munro was pushing “myth” over “fact” for saying the bill would be “more than 1,000 pages.” The Post’s Nakamura, the Miami Herald, and theWashington Examiner’s Byron York also received criticism from Rubio for their articles reporting the estimate of the bill's length.

Rubio also attacked his Senate colleagues, criticizing Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) for saying it was a “thousand-page bill” and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for suggesting the estimates could place the bill's length as high as 1,600 pages long.

The first version of the bill that was filed by the eight senators--Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Michael Bennet (D-CO), and Bob Menendez (D-NJ)--totaled 844 pages. An updated version, filed just before the bill went to the committee markup, stretched 867 pages in length.

The new bill towers over previous versions in length, clocking in at 1,076 pages. It was introduced on Tuesday afternoon.