Congressional Democrats want you to believe that they really care about the amount of debt that college graduates have. Senators want you to believe that the FFELP is so rife with corruption and the financial misdeeds of greedy corporate and private lenders that they simply must act!

The truth is that no major legislation has come out of Congress in years. The politicians in Congress don’t get along, don’t work together, and put politics and polemics above the needs of the average taxpayer every single day. They’ve taken a lot of heat lately from the voters, who are tired of hearing their Congressional representatives and Senators point the finger at each other and blame the other side of the aisle for their inability to get things done.

Congressional Democrats think they have a shot at the White House in 2008 and they’re desperate to prove to the voters that they are a party of action that they’ll do anything to make themselves look good, and distract the voters from the fact that they’ve been wholly ineffective for years.

The student loan lending legislation is just a tool for the Congressional Democrats to make voters think they can get something done. It doesn’t matter what it is, they just want to make themselves look busy.

They don’t care about the impact that these devastating pieces of legislation will have on middle-class America. They don’t care if the measures they’ve offered have very little benefit to anyone. They don’t really care about what happens to the poorest of students. Congressional Democrats are willing to railroad the most marginalized students into a shoddy, government-run program so they can make themselves look good. If it weren’t student loan lending this year, it would have been something else. It could be something else. Next year, it will be something else

Here’s the real danger: Congress isn’t going to look back on student loan legislation until 2013. It doesn’t matter how much the cost of tuition and other expenses rise in that time. They will allocate a specific amount of money, and that’s that. This “set-and-forget” mentality is why the Stafford Loan caps went 15 years without adjustment, even though the cost of tuition was skyrocketing. That’s why the FFELP PLUS loans have a higher interest rate than the FDLP PLUS loans (a “typo” that Congress never bothered to go back and fix). That’s why Pell Grant amounts are so abysmally low.

Congress sets up a funding mechanism that lasts for years, but they never bother to go back to find out if the funding they projected was adequate for the task, or if it needs to be adjusted.

Tell your Congressmen and Senators that you don’t want them to forget. Tell them that you think the current funding mechanism is stable and well financed.