In the wee hours this morning, the omnibus emerged from the bowels of the Capitol to be posted on the House Rules site:

Speed readers beware: the bill is 3,565 pages and contains many more thousands of earmarks worth billions of dollars. Just how many thousands and billions, we’ll get back to you shortly.

Depending on how the house decides to proceed, this could be taken up late tonight; otherwise it will be on the floor tomorrow. We’ll keep you posted.

Also as we peruse the bill we are finding dozens (probably hundreds by the time we are through) of “airdropped” earmarks – those not in the original House or Senate bills, but added in conference. Also, the committee apparently slapped a 1.6 percent across the board cut, which is not reflected in the disclosure tables. In other words the earmarks are slightly smaller than they appear (a $100,000 earmark in the table is actually $98,400).

More to follow on the Consolidated Appropriations Act (they didn’t want to call it an Omnibus!).