[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10873]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      STUDENT LOAN INTEREST RATES

  (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, in 2 days, at midnight, by law, the 
interest rates for the subsidized Stafford student loan program will 
double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, raising interest rates for 7.5 
million college students at exactly the time they are taking out loans 
for next fall's semester.
  What a terrible statement about this Congress that we failed to move 
forward with legislation to protect those rates. My legislation, H.R. 
1595, which had 195 discharge signatures, would have protected that 
rate.
  Again, the leadership of this House turned a deaf ear and insisted 
that their bill, passed on May 23, somehow protected those college 
students. The Congressional Budget Office looked at that bill that 
passed that day, and it concluded that that bill was worse than doing 
nothing and allowing the rates to double to 6.8 percent. It is, again, 
a bill which will put kids into a variable rate system that, over time, 
we know will be higher than 6.8 percent.
  I think of the disgust that America will feel on July 1 when they see 
that a critical need--higher education--was overlooked and ignored on 
top of the failure to turn off sequester and to pass a farm bill. It is 
time for this Congress to act and to protect the lower interest rates 
for America's college students.

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