House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) released the following statement about the “stimulus” and the floor action schedule for tomorrow:

The House is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and is expected to proceed directly to consideration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment conference report. The conference report text will be filed this evening, giving members enough time to review the conference report before voting on it tomorrow afternoon.

Let’s pretend the conference report is to be distributed right now — 5:30pm EST — to House members (in reality, it likely won’t be until later tonight). That would leave 15 1/2 hours, or 930 minutes, for consideration of the 1,434-page conference report before floor action on the bill commences — one and a half pages a minute from now until the morning, with no stops for any reason whatsoever.

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the House — including Hoyer himself — unanimously voted in favor of a 48-hour review period for the porkulus before action was taken on it. Is one night really enough time to read for the first time and consider a bill that would borrow and spend an amount of money that, if it were GDP, would make it the fifteenth largest economy in the world?

Of course not. Unfortunately, this type of a move from the supposedly transparency-loving Democrats isn’t exactly unprecedented.