And given the heft of the several-thousand-page document, as Ed Morrissey points out, the bill would essentially be filibustering itself:

  Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who developed a close friendship with President Obama when they served together in the Senate, is threatening to have the entire health care bill read on the Senate floor.

  Senior Senate Democratic aides had heard Coburn was considering having potentially thousands of pages read aloud in effort to stall passage. “If he did this it would be even outrageous for a guy who’s become known as Dr. No around here,” one of them told POLITICO.

  Coburn’s office confirmed that he is indeed thinking about having the bill read.

Supposing just the 1,990 pages of the original bill (and undoubtedly a lot more when you start counting in amendments) and a steady 2 minutes per page rate of reading, it’d take roughly 66 hours to read through the bill.

Given that the Senate typically has other business to attend to, and isn’t likely to stay in session for the 12 hours a day for five days (with about six hours left over for a sixth day) it would take to read this thing the reading itself could stretch into weeks.  And if Republicans insist on the bill being read aloud again if there are changes or amendments, we’re talking about months of delay.

And yeah, that would totally be a publicity stunt.  But it would be a stunt that would at least slow the progress of this bill down enough so that the American public could get a handle on what it would do to the way they get health care.  And, you know, let the Senators being asked to vote on it time to actually read it for themselves too.

Remember that our founding fathers devised a government that would move slowly, and act only with broad consensus.  What Democrats are trying to do on health care is the exact opposite of that.

Good on Republicans for at least trying to foil their efforts.