House OKS student loan rate freeze

Health care fund’s cut to pay for it. Veto threatened; Senate Democrats plot alternate tack.

WASHINGTON — Republicans ignored a veto threat and overcame a rebellion by party conservatives Friday to push through the House a bill keeping interest rates on millions of federal student loans from doubling this summer.

Lawmakers voted 215- 195 to approve a bill that has become an electionyear battle between the two parties.

The White House and most Democrats opposed the $5.9 billion bill because of how Republicans covered the costs: eliminating a preventive health care fund in President Barack Obama’s health care law. They say the program mostly benefits women, while Republicans call it a loosely controlled slush fund.

“This is a politically motivated proposal and not the serious response that the problem facing America’s college students deserves,” the White House wrote in a veto message shortly before the House vote.

The House measure is destined to die in the Senate, where majority Democrats have written a version of the bill paid for by raising Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on high-income owners of some privately owned companies, which GOP senators oppose.

GOP lawmakers were pressured by conservative groups like the Club for Growth to oppose the legislation because, they said, the government should not subsidize student loans. In the end, 30 Republicans voted no, while 202 voted yes.

Among Georgia’s dele- gation, five Republicans voted against the bill: Paul Broun, Tom Graves, Tom Price, Lynn Westmoreland and Robert Woodall. All Georgia Democrats voted against it except John Barrow, who supported it along with Republicans Phil Gingrey and Austin Scott. Republican Jack Kingston did not vote.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-ohio, said Democrats had invented a Republican “war on women” for political gain. “To pick this big political fight where there is no fight is just silly. Give me a break,” he said, winning a standing ovation from GOP lawmakers.

On the Democratic side, party leaders pressured rank-and-file lawmakers to oppose the Republican measure. Some Democrats wanted to vote to keep student loan rates low, though it meant accepting health care cuts.

In the end, 165 Democrats opposed the bill, and 13 voted for it.

The House bill would keep the interest rate for subsidized Stafford loans at 3.4 percent for another year. Without congressional action, the loan rate would rise automatically to 6.8 percent on July 1, a condition set in a law Democrats pushed through Congress five years ago.

Republicans noted that many Democrats had voted earlier this year to take money from the preventive health fund to help keep doctors’ Medicare reimbursements from dropping. Obama’s own budget in February proposed cutting $4 billion from the same fund to pay for some of his priorities.

Democrats noted that Republicans previously had questioned the wisdom of keeping student loan interest rates low. They also accused Republicans of reversing themselves, after voting earlier this month for a 2013 federal budget that let Stafford loan rates double as scheduled.