Does this sound like a health care debate the Democrats will lose?

The Washington Times is reporting that Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who once said your neighbors could solve our nation’s health care problems, wants the entire Democratic health care reform bill to be read aloud on the floor of the Senate:

The 2,074-page Senate health care bill would take 34 hours to read cover to cover — and that’s just what Sen. Tom Coburn wants done on the Senate floor.

The Oklahoma Republican has threatened to invoke parliamentary rules to force the Senate clerk (or more likely, a team of clerks) to read the massive bill before the full Senate begins formal debate on the legislation.

The move is strictly according to Senate rules, which say any senator can demand a bill be read in its entirety before debate begins. While Democrats could, if they wish, repeatedly make motions to end the soliloquy, Republicans on the floor could object, and the reading would continue.

via Health bill could get 34-hour reading in Senate – Washington Times.

Consider the optics here: Yes, it’s a delaying tactic. But if you’re Senator Mitch McConnell on your way to lead the Senate’s Republicans up against a commanding Democratic majority, isn’t your argument that Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn’t have the 60 votes he needs to invoke cloture on a filibuster of the bill? Doesn’t delaying the debate and eventual vote show that you don’t have what you need to defeat the bill?

Perhaps we underestimated Senator Reid and the Democrats should all be smiling right now.

But hey, if Coburn really wants to go there, maybe the Democrats can pull a page out of Henry Waxman’s playbook and red-shirt an ex-NDT/CEDA college policy debater as a Senate clerk. If that kid could get through 1 page in 34 seconds, it brings the time down to about 19 and a half hours.

And that guy wasn’t even fast. A good former First Affirmative Rebuttalist (1AR) should be able to speed read or ’spread’ his way through that bill in about 8 hours at the most. But watch out for those wily card-clipping 1ARs.

(If you understand any of that, please out yourself as a former traveler on the college debate crazy train.)