This morning, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent reported that "Dems are getting ready to jump on GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell over a local TV report in Kentucky saying that McConnell has acknowledged not reading the whole health care bill - even though GOPers challenged Dems to read the bill earlier this summer."
But, so far, it seems that this is a fight Democrats would rather avoid. DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he doesn't have a comment on McConnell's statement, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee did not return a phone call requesting comment.
Criticizing McConnell on this would obviously open up Democrats to the same attack. The president has not committed to reading the entire bill before he signs it, and I don't know of any Democrats who have said they've read the bill. At this point, that's understandable since neither the House nor the Senate has yet stitched together a bill that will go to the floor. But if Obamacare supporters argue, like Sen. Specter did, that they simply won't have time to read the bill because decisions have to be made "quickly", it probably won't go over so well.
One senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill argues that opponents of the bill don't have the same obligation to read it that supporters do. If a congressman knows he won't vote for the bill because it contains a government-run insurance program, hundreds of billions in deficit-spending, an individual mandate, and/or tax hikes, he doesn't need to be informed about superfluous reasons to oppose the bill. "If I read the ingredients on a soda bottle and I see the first ingredient is rat piss, I don't need to keep on reading," says the Republican aide. By reading the entire bill, however, Republicans could compel Democrats to do the same and draw scrutiny to all of the bad provisions in it.