Tom Harkin: “we are now on the student loan bill, so to speak. There is going to be a few hours of debate on the bill…”

“we are now on the student loan bill, so to speak. There is going to be a few hours of debate on the bill itself--actually 3 hours. As I understand it, there will be three amendments in order under the rule on this bill. So we will probably be on this bill for some time this afternoon. But we do want to finish it. I know the leader wants to finish it. Both the majority leader and Republican leader want to get this finished today, so we will be working on this bill for probably the better part of this afternoon. I would like to set the stage for it by talking about the situation with student loans and why we are where we are right now. First of all, I would like to say the bill before us basically is the House bill. There will be a Manchin-Burr amendment that will be offered as a substitute. I will be supporting that. That is the compromise bill. That is the compromise we reached through several weeks of negotiations between the Republicans on the Senate side and the Democrats on the Senate side and the White House. It was a three-party negotiation that went on, and this is the compromise that was reached. So the bill before us represents a number of compromises that were made on both sides to produce legislation that would give certainty to students who borrow money from the Federal Government to attend college this fall. As we all know, we have debated several different measures related to student loan interest rates for several weeks.…”