House Passes College Cost Reduction Act

With a 273-149 vote, the House passed the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 today.

The bill will provide the single largest increase in college aid since the GI bill in 1944. The legislation invests about $18 billion dollars over the next five years in reducing college costs, helping millions of students and families. It comes at no new cost to taxpayers, and is funded by cutting excess subsidies paid by the federal government to lenders in the student loan industry.

And the bill came with some welcome fireworks from Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller in response to an all-too typical effort by Republicans to kill the bill with a motion to recommit at the end of the debate.

"You could have written a motion another way, you deliberately wrote it this way so you could kill this bill. What is it you don’t like about this bill? You don’t like the fact that while you were in power after years of flat lining the Pell Grant, we we’ve finally given them the biggest increase in decades for the poorest kids in this country. You don’t like that so you want to kill the bill. You don’t like the fact that were going to take 5 million middle class kids and extend to them a loan thats interest rate is cut in half? While their families are struggling to get them through college? They’re making sacrifices every year? You’re going to do this? You’re going to kill this bill? Are you proud? Are you proud of this amendment, that you are going to try to kill this bill? Say it louder."

More Republican obstructionism thorugh procedural moves. While the Senate GOP succeeded in scuttling the Webb amendment today, the House GOP failed miserably with their game, to the benefit of American families.

For some fun, watch Miller: