Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has indicated recently that he and Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander have agreed on an education reform program that they think the Senate will approve. But he apparently forgot to tell Alexander, who says there’s no such deal,
The Hill reports.
Harkin, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told C-SPAN last month that he and Alexander had agreed on a strategy to pass a restructuring of No Child Left Behind in the Senate. “
Sen. Alexander came up with, I thought, a very good idea on how we would handle this on the floor,” Harkin said. He called the plan “quite ingenious,” but declined to reveal the specifics.
Alexander, a former Education secretary, says he doesn’t know what Harkin is talking about.
“The only discussions that several of us had . . . was that this would seem to be a piece of legislation that has bipartisan support — still a lot of work to be done on it,” Alexander told The Hill.
“It’s the kind of bill that perhaps we could persuade Senate Republicans to agree that we would only allow relevant amendments if [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid would agree that all of those amendments could be debated and voted on and considered,” he said.
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