[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10752-10753]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     LET'S CONTINUE THE GREAT WORK

  (Mr. COURTNEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, with a few minutes to spare, we just voted 
to make sure that the interest rate for the Stafford student loan 
program was going to stay at 3.4 and avoid the doubling of rates, which 
would have happened Saturday night if we had not acted. This is an 
issue which took months to get to. President Obama challenged Congress 
back at the State of the Union in January, telling us that

[[Page 10753]]

we must act. It took months to get any response. And I want to 
congratulate the 130,000 college students all across America who 
submitted a petition to the Speaker's office saying it was time to get 
moving.
  We started the countdown clock on that day at Day 110, and now we are 
officially defusing the time bomb that would have exploded with a 
higher interest rate if we had not acted. We have a lot more work to do 
with the high cost of college and student loan debt, which now exceeds 
credit card debt and consumer loan debt. But having said that, we saw 
today an honest compromise; people coming together to make sure that 
that lower rate was going to be extended. Let's use that example to 
move forward and solve this problem for middle class families all 
across America.
  Again, to those students who worked so hard to have their voices 
heard, congratulations. Let's roll up our sleeves and continue the 
great work.

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