The Illiad and the Gang Of Eight Immigration Bill

The "Gang Of Eight" immigration legislation is a monster of a bill...At 209,000 words in 1,077 pages, the legislation is almost impossible for even the educated layman to comprehend--and its size is hiding tons of senatorial pork rendering it inherently undemocratic.

To provide an sense of how long the bill is,  the Center For Immigration Studies has provided a few comparisons:

• 27 times longer than the Constitution (7,600 words)
• 14 times longer than the Social Security Act of 1935 (15,000 words)
• 28 times longer than the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (7,300), which ushered in the modern immigration era
• 5 times longer than the last big amnesty law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (42,000)
• Longer than the New Testament (180,000)
• Longer than the Torah (156,000)
• More than twice as long as the Koran (77,000)
• Twice the length of Orwell's 1984 (89,000)
• Longer than Homer's Iliad (150,000)
• About the same length as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
• End-to-end, the pages would stretch more than three football fields, be taller than the Washington Monument, and nearly as tall as New York's Chrysler Building
• Reading it aloud, at 120 words per minute, would take 29 straight hours.

The rabbis teach us that there are no extra words in the Torah...every word, every letter is there for a purpose.  Jews believe that God wrote the Torah which means our maker told the entire history of the world from creation through Moses in fewer words than this immigration bill which will get its first test votes this week.

For a bill to be that large, there must be lots in it the "gang of eight" doesn't want the public to know about.