WASHINGTON -- A vote to restore lower interest rates on some new federal student loans for one year failed Tuesday along mostly party lines, garnering only 51 votes.
The vote comes after a month-long campaign to raise public awareness of the doubling of these rates. On July 1, the rates on some new loans, for about 7 million students, doubled from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent upon the expiration of a 2007 law that had gradually lowered the rates. Republicans, Democrats and the White House trotted out their own social media hashtags to encourage students to convince lawmakers not to "double my rates," but the advocacy yielded no substantive action.
The politics are muddled because in its 2014 budget, the White House proposed a