Megan Hanson, a young woman in a purple button-down Oxford shirt, came early to the Senate State Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday afternoon, sat along the wall by the door and set up a small video camera on a tripod.

One of the measures being considered by the committee was SB 43, a “Know Before You Owe” bill, aimed at protecting university students from what some say is an aggressive, predatory loan industry. But Hanson did not come to learn about the bill. She is much more interested in the bill’s sponsor, former Senate President Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, who is now running to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman in Colorado congressional swing district 6.

Hanson is a candidate tracker for America Rising, the national opposition research group aimed at “exposing the truth about Democrats.”

Hanson has followed Carroll around for months already, taping her speaking in committee, walking through the Capitol hallways, pressing her to say whether she thinks the Obama administration Iran deal “will lead to the funding of terrorism.”

Hanson’s presence in the Republican-controlled Senate “kill committee” was just a more obvious signal that the hearing on Carroll’s bill would be as much about electoral politics as about the practices of the student lending industry.

Carroll’s bill aimed to prevent private lenders from giving gifs to college and university staffers in exchange for any kind of advantage in lending to students. It would have bound lenders to tell students exactly what they would pay for any loan and it would have done away with fees charged to students who pay off their loans early. It also would have required lenders to inform students of the kind of loans that were also available through the government — usually lower interest with better payback terms — and the bill would have allowed students to cancel within three days any loan agreement they might sign with a private lender without penalty.

The committee voted along party lines to kill the bill. Ray Scott, R-Grand Junction, Jerry Sonenberg, R-Sterling, and Owen Hill, R-Colorado Springs, voted against the measure with Matt Jones, D-Louisville, and Jessie Ulibarri, D-Westminster, voting in support of the bill.

The Colorado Bankers Association testified in opposition, arguing the bill would apply to very few banks in the state and that it might violate federal regulations already in place.

Mostly students testified in favor of the bill. They argued that lenders saw them as a ripe market to mine, creating more unnecessary hurdles for them to clear in their already hectic lives, working jobs while attending classes and studying in order to get ahead in their lives.

Carroll’s Senate district — and the congressional district she hopes to represent in Washington — includes a large swath of working class, immigrant and first-generation families. Her bill would certainly play well with her current and would-be constituents, but she said she thought it should have fared better across party lines.

“I worked my way through college in multiple jobs, studied hard for my classes, and played by the rules that said if you work hard and earn a degree, you can achieve your own American dream,” Carroll said in a prepared statement. “I’ve been fortunate in my career, which makes my obligation to give those in the middle class who saw the private lending system work against them the same opportunities I had after I graduated.”

Carroll told The Colorado Statesman after the vote that she thinks the Legislature is obligated to act on student debt.

“This was a very big missed opportunity. The result was very partisan,” she said.

The committee earlier Wednesday killed another Carroll bill, SB28, the “Community Re-Investment Act,” which would have required increased reporting of demographic data in state contracts to help gauge whether contractors were hiring ethnic minorities and women in numbers that reflect the make up of Colorado communities.

— kara@coloradostatesman.com