THE long list of reasons why Congress has failed to reform immigration has just expanded. John Boehner, the House Speaker, explained on November 13th that he would not bring the Senate’s immigration proposal to a vote because it was “a 1,300-page bill that no one had ever read”. Mr Boehner has other reasons to avoid a vote: Republicans are happy to keep talking about Obamacare and in no rush to increase the number of Hispanic voters, 71% of whom chose Barack Obama in 2012. Yet for all that, Mr Boehner is right.

In 1948 the average length of bills that made it through Congress was two and a half pages. Now it is 20. That may not sound too much, but the mean is brought down by short, uncontroversial laws like the two-page bill passed in June to rename an air traffic control building in New Hampshire after a long-serving employee.

The most consequential laws, by contrast, go on for thousands of pages. The Affordable Care Act runs to 2,400 and has spawned a vast labyrinth of explanatory regulations. A staffer who took a copy home as a souvenir after the Senate passed it on Christmas Eve 2009 had to remove it from his luggage or face an excess-baggage charge, says Donald Richie of the Senate Historical Office.

Verbosity is bipartisan: the No Child Left Behind bill of 2001 ran to over 1,000 pages (its sponsor was a Mr Boehner). Greater length is partly a consequence of the increases in computing power that have made it easier for people to produce interminable documents. But it is mainly a result of gridlock in Congress.

Paradoxically, this reflects the success of campaigns for cleaner government. The number of earmarks—defined as funding for pet projects introduced by congressmen and senators to benefit their districts or states—has dropped by 98% since Congress agreed to a moratorium in 2010. Citizens Against Government Waste, a group which used to bring live pigs to the launch of its annual catalogue of pork-barrel spending, no longer bothers.

Earmarks were an effective way to persuade congressmen to vote for laws they disliked. Now they are gone, lawmakers tend to vote as their conscience dictates; and it usually tells them to block whatever the other party is doing. Mr Boehner has helped to clog up the system by allowing votes only on bills that a majority of House Republicans support.