Author Archive

With the passage of health care reform and the SAFRA student aid package in the House of Representatives on Sunday night, the two initiatives move to the Senate for what could be final approval.

The Washington Post has an article out this morning about where the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) stands, and it’s got mostly good news for supporters of the measure. A spokesman for Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL), a SAFRA skeptic, is quoted as saying that “it looks like” student loan reform is “in the health-care and education legislation to stay.” The Post itself says that “Democratic support for the bill appears to be solidifying in the Senate, even among senators who have expressed concerns about the lending overhaul.”

Debate in the Senate on health care and SAFRA, which are being voted on under special rules as part of a “reconciliation” budget package, began yesterday. Senate Democrats are hoping to bring the bill to a final vote by the end of the week, though if any changes are made in the Senate, those changes would be kicked back to the House for that body’s approval.

Thursday Morning Update | So … yep. The bill is going back to the House.

Late last night, Senate Republicans identified two glitches in the House HCR/SAFRA bill, and won a ruling from the parliamentarian that those glitches will have to be fixed before the bill becomes a law. What that means is that when the Senate passes its version of the bill, it will make those changes, and that the House will then have to take up the bill again to amend it to match.

On its own, this development is unlikely to mean much. Neither of the changes the Senate will be making are of any great significance, and there’s no reason to believe that the House won’t just pass them by the same margins it passed the original bill.

One piece of the equation does shift slightly, though, as the Republicans now have a new argument to use in pushing for bigger changes to the bill. Since the reforms are going back to the House anyway, they’re saying, why not make some substantive improvements? But the Senate rejected twenty-nine Republican amendments yesterday, and there’s no indication in this morning’s reporting that the Democrats are likely to rise to the bait.

The Senate plans to vote on the corrected bill early this afternoon.

Second Update | Congress-geek journal The Hill has a rundown of last night’s votes — four of the Senate’s fifty-nine Dems (Bayh, Lincoln, Webb, and Ben Nelson) voted for at least one of the Republicans’ 29 amendments last night, and three of the chamber’s Republicans voted against at least one. More amendments will be voted on this morning, but the GOP would need to win ten Democratic votes while holding all of their own to prevail on any of them.

Seems pretty clear that’s not going to happen.

Third Update | The Senate approved the revised bill with no further amendments this afternoon, by a vote of 56-43. The House is expected to accept the Senate’s fixes this evening.

The University of California Board of Regents are holding a three-day meeting at UC San Francisco this week. The meeting starts this morning, and ends on Thursday.

A preview of the meeting from the UC Berkeley Daily Californian can be found here, and another writeup with a bunch of links is here. UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng has put together a briefing on the meeting’s agenda, and he’ll be liveblogging the meeting starting at 10:30 am Pacific Time today. If any news breaks, I’ll of course cover it here.

One item to watch is a proposed change in professional fee policy that the San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this month — a change which would drop the word “public” from the phrase “total in-state fees charged will be at or below the total tuition and/or fees charged by comparable degree programs at other comparable public institutions.” As I wrote at the time, this is an astoundingly ill-considered idea, from any number of perspectives.

So what’s the status of that proposal? It’s not clear. According to Jesse Cheng, there’s no reference to it in any of the meeting materials distributed so far — not in the publicly available agenda, and not in the documents distributed to the student regents.

There’s a similar item is on the agenda — a statement asserting the Regents’ power to set any student fee “at any level it deems appropriate” — but what happened to the amendment the Chronicle reported on remains a mystery.

When we get more, you’ll get more.

Update | A commenter has linked to a press release about a planned protest.

After a morning USSA meeting in DC, I spent most of the day driving north on I-95 in a ridiculously blinding rainstorm. Posting will resume tomorrow.

When SAFRA passed the House of Representatives last September, just four Democrats voted “no” — Boyd, Herseth-Sandlin, McMahon, and Kanjorski. With the combined SAFRA/Health Care bill coming down to the wire this evening, let’s take a look at where those four Representatives stand today.

Allen Boyd voted against Health Care Reform last November, but is expected to vote yes today. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin and Michael McMahon voted no in November, and both plan to vote no again.

Which means that only Paul Kanjorski voted no on SAFRA in September and yes on HCR in November. And according to the blog Firedoglake, Kanjorski is still keeping mum about his plans for this evening. According to their reporting, “the Congressman may never announce his vote, just vote on the bill and leave the chamber.”

Private lender Sallie Mae has offices in Kanjorski’s district, and Firedoglake sums up his position this way: “putting the needs of lobbyists over $57 million for students in his district is just … craven.”

It’s now looking like the bill is a pretty safe pass, but I’ll be very curious to see how Kanjorski votes.

The media are buzzing with last-minute news on the fate of President Obama’s healthcare reform plan, which is scheduled to come to a vote in the House of Representatives this afternoon. But it’s also crunch time for SAFRA, the massive financial aid overhaul that’s been bundled with that bill. Here’s what’s going on:

The House’s vote on the SAFRA/HCR package is expected early this evening, after a day of procedural preparations. Most observers expect the margin of that vote to be razor-close, but they expect the bill to pass. This is because the Democratic leadership is believed to have a small reserve of potential “yes” votes available — members of Congress who would take a big political hit for voting in favor, but who would be willing to do so if their “no” votes meant the bill’s failure.

It’s possible that there will be some last-minute jockeying over the language of the House bill, though that prospect is growing increasingly unlikely. SAFRA is almost guaranteed not to be a factor today — student aid reform is quite popular in the House, but it’s a less politically charged issue than HCR, so there’s no mileage to be gained from tinkering with it in either direction.

The SAFRA language that the House will be voting on today was released on Thursday. It’s been scaled-back considerably since the summer — of the original $80 billion in savings in the bill, all of which was touted as going to increased aid to education and students, only about $42 billion remains.

But that $42 billion includes tens of billions in new funding for Pell Grants, which have seen a steep increase in applicants since the start of the current recession. It also includes new funding for community colleges — money that at one point in negotiations was stripped from the bill — and a new measure capping student loan payments under the Income-Based Repayment Program at ten percent of a borrower’s total income.

If the SAFRA/HCR package passes the House today, it heads back to the Senate for a reconciliation vote — a vote to “reconcile” the Senate’s language with the House’s. That vote, US Student Association president Gregory Cendana told me yesterday, is scheduled to take place by the end of this week.

The Senate leadership has shown House Democrats a letter in which more than fifty Senators pledge to support the reconciliation bill, and that bill is widely expected to pass with little trouble. But it’s still possible that changes could be made, and if SAFRA is weakened before passage, it’ll happen in the Senate, not the House.

The national news media have been focusing all their attention on the House stage of this process in recent days, and as more information about SAFRA’s Senate prospects becomes available I’ll pass it along. But that’s a thumbnail sketch of what to look for — HCR drama in the House today, last-minute SAFRA lobbying in the Senate for the rest of the week.