HARRISBURG — Republicans’ sprawling, fast-track pension legislation made it through the Senate on Wednesday, but Democrats attacked its central money-saving strategy as unconstitutional and said it would leave pensioners in poverty and do little to immediately relieve the pain of a $53 billion pension debt.

The 28-19 vote was along party lines, with every Democrat and one Republican against it.

Republicans, who cast the massive pension debt as the state’s greatest financial challenge, made no effort to bargain with Democrats in the Senate minority and instead suggested the only Democrat with whom they are interested in bargaining is Gov. Tom Wolf. They hailed the bill’s passage as a historic effort to save the pension system from an outdated benefit plan that has been rendered unaffordable by longer living retirees.

“I think it’s a huge day, (when) a bill of this magnitude, this type of reform gets passed in any body,” said Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre. “We’ve been struggling for this for years. To get this accomplished today is historic.”

He called the bill the most comprehensive and important pension reform measure to date.

Primarily, the bill seeks to end the traditional pension system, which covers about 330,000 retirees or beneficiaries, and require concessions from many of the 370,000 current state government and public school employees.

That concession would amount to a 20 percent reduction in benefits, according to the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union. Meanwhile, new hires would be left with benefits about one-third the size of an employee hired under the current rules, according to an analysis by the school employees’ pension system.