Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) chimed in late Thursday on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) offer on how to avert a student loan interest rate hike on July 1.
McConnell’s spokesman Don Stewart said in an email to TPM:
While we still haven’t heard from the White House on our bipartisan proposal, we are encouraged to see the majority leader drop his insistence on taxing job creators. We will review these new proposals and hope that they will finally review the bipartisan proposals we sent a week ago. But bottom line, now that Democrats are willing to take this issue seriously, and not just use students as props, we may be making progress.
And we were particularly surprised to see the majority leader acknowledge that forcing businesses to ‘redirect money away from job creation’ is bad for jobs. As tax hikes on job creators would certainly redirect funds from job creation, we hope that sentiment will continue and we renew our call for Democrats to join our effort to prevent the largest tax hike in American history.
