Last week, Politifact looked at the claim by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that the Senate version of health care reform is longer than War and Peace. The claim was “barely true,” found Politifact, a Pulitzer-prize winning fact-checking Web site from the St. Petersburg Times.

New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall also thinks the claims are a little overblown, and he’s been quoted by the Washington Times in a story on the subject.

In the story, Udall says, “You only have print on one side, which isn’t even the way we print them up around here. I’ve had mine printed up on both sides, so I use both sides of the paper. So they’ve made an attempt here to make it look a lot higher than it is,” he said.

Hatch’s claim was correct–based solely on page count–but as Politifact points out, “using pages as the benchmark is misleading.” A more accurate way to compare is using word count–and by that measure, Tolsty’s novel is longer.

More importantly, bills aren’t printed like novels.

The page layout of a Senate bill is much different from a novel. The bill uses much larger type, on 8.5-by-11-inch paper. The margins are larger and there are wider spaces between the lines. On balance, then, fewer words fit on a page of the Senate bill than fit on the page of the paperback novel.

The blog Gawker joked:

Republicans here are acting like desperate undergraduates trying to meet a page requirement for an essay about the Sociology of the Bicycle: MARGINS: 3.5″; FONT: 25pt; SPACING: 2.999. GRADE: C-

Not that I ever did anything like that when I was in college trying to get to a 10-page paper requirement…