Front Row Washington
Tracking U.S. politics
The First Draft: More is Less
The Senate has spoken — for the moment. But it’s definitely not in one voice.
Senator Harry Reid, the leader of Democrats, last night unveiled a healthcare bill cobbled from two Senate versions. 
At 2,074 pages, it is longer than the 1,990-page House bill. But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put the plan’s 10-year cost at $849 billion, which is below President Barack Obama’s $900 billion goal and the House bill which came in at more than $1 trillion.
So apparently when it comes to legislation, more pages mean lower cost.
Republicans are gearing up for a fight including possible delay tactics such as forcing the whole bill to be read out loud on the Senate floor. “It’s going to be a holy war,” Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, tells the Los Angeles Times.
Offerings from morning TV shows: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell is following Sarah Palin’s book tour and reported from Fort Wayne, Indiana, in front of a long line of people waiting for the former Alaska governor turned former Republican vice presidential candidate turned current author. 
NBC’s “Today” show also had Twilight’s Robert Pattinson ahead of the movie release of “New Moon” — this is one of those if you have to ask (as I did) moments… One woman in the crowd outside the NBC studio was excitedly showing Pattinson a doll and telling him it was of him — that’s real star power.
Click here for more Reuters political coverage
Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October), Reuters/Fred Prouser (Pattinson at Los Angeles premiere)
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What started out as a hopeful endeavor, and been perverted into a massive clusterf**k of corporate whoring, the likes of which I have never seen before. We should stop pretending Congress represents anything other than their corporate owners. Democracy? What a complete farce – we should just allow corporations to openly buy seats in Congress.