Warren’s bill sparked a fierce debate in the Senate. Warren student loan bill stalls

The Senate on Wednesday voted not to move forward on a bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren that would have allowed an estimated 25 million people with older student loans to refinance that debt at current, lower interest rates.

Democrats are vowing to keep the issue alive and bring it back for another airing this year.


“We’re not giving up,” Warren said at a press conference shortly after the vote, slamming Republicans for blocking the bill.

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Warren’s bill sparked a fierce debate in the Senate, where Republicans said Democrats are cynically capitalizing on student loan debt for election-year gains.

“I’ve been calling on the majority leader to press pause on his party’s non-stop campaign,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday morning.

President Barack Obama and second lady Jill Biden had thrown their support behind the bill in recent days, and Obama on Monday rolled out new executive actions to help address student loan debt alongside the action in the Senate.

Senate Democrats “want an issue to campaign on to save their own hides this November,” McConnell said. “Americans are not going to fall for this spin.”

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Newly installed Education Department Undersecretary Ted Mitchell suggested the Education Department will continue exploring student loan debt refinancing at a town hall later Wednesday.

“I think that those approaches around refinancing and repackaging are promising, and we’ll continue to pursue that as an option,” Mitchell said during his first public appearance since taking the post. After the event, however, he declined to elaborate.

The return to partisanship on student loans is a stark contrast to a deal on student loan rates last year, where Congress and the president were able to find common ground. The 2013 agreement stopped some student loan rates from doubling and switched the mechanism for determining interest rates from a fixed number to a variable rate determined by rates on the 10-year Treasury note. It also tackled a much broader issue than Warren’s bill — student loan interest rates — whereas Warren’s bill would help only with refinancing, and only for some borrowers.

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Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), ranking member of the Senate education committee, implored the chamber to send Warren’s bill, which skipped the committee process, back to the education committee — and take up veterans and appropriations legislation that is waiting for floor time in the chamber instead.

Warren’s bill would pay for refinancing students’ loans by raising taxes on the wealthy, a guaranteed non-starter for Republicans in the Senate and the House. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who Tuesday said Democrats will bring it back to the floor in the future if it fails to pass Congress — has in the past said that paying for a student loan bill using the so-called “Buffet rule” is a surefire way to politicize it.

But Warren and other Democrats have cast the bill as a choice between helping students and helping the rich.

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“With this vote, we show the American people who we work for in the United States Senate: billionaires or students,” Warren said on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

And “instead of fighting for working families and college affordability, some members of Congress are fighting to keep their millionaire constituents from paying their fair share of taxes,” National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said in response to the Senate’s action.

Schumer insisted Democrats are open to other means of paying for the bill aside from taxing the rich.

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“This is not a serious proposal and everybody in the Senate knows that,” Alexander said. The bill would violate the Budget Control Act, Alexander said, and has no chance of being taken up in the House.

But Young Invincibles, one of the primary groups promoting Warrallieen’s now-failed vote, said the Senate’s failure to invoke cloture was “frustrating.”

“It is frustrating to watch the Senate refuse to even debate this bill while $1.2 trillion dollars in student debt stifles our generation’s opportunities,” Deputy Director Rory O’Sullivan said. “We are deeply disappointed that the Senate voted to block a measure that would have provided immediate relief to America’s student loan borrowers.”

Ultimately, changes to student debt will likely come through an update to the Higher Education Act, the main law that lays out student loan policy in the U.S. But the rewriting process for that bill is just beginning, and it will likely take years to get signed into law.

Senate HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, who has not attended recent press conferences on Warren’s bill, said in a statement that Republicans are “hurting millions of borrowers with outstanding student loans.”

But Harkin said that the vote “was only a first step” in fixing student debt and he hopes to help borrowers in the future through reauthorizing the Higher Education Act.

Harkin said he looks forward to working with colleagues on “both sides of the aisle” on HEA in the future.

Allie Grasgreen contributed to this report.