Examiner Congressional Reporter Susan Ferrechio reports that House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that he would support a bill to wind down the Export-Import Bank — an increasingly important totem of industrial policy for both the conservative wing of the GOP and the K Street wing of the party. But the Ohio Republican made it clear that he did not want the House to, through inaction, let the agency’s charter expire June 30.
This puts Boehner at odds with Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, whose prescribed course of action is to simply let Ex-Im expire, passing nothing out of the committee or through the House.
At the same time, Boehner’s statement is his first expression of support for the conservative cause to kill Ex-Im.
“I support any plan that the chairman can get through his committee,” Boehner said on Capitol Hill today, as reported by Politico’s Jake Sherman. “Whether it would reform the bank, wind it down — but there are thousands of jobs on the line that would disappear pretty quickly if the Ex-Im bank were to disappear. So I told the chairman he needs to come up with a plan because the risk is, if he does nothing, the Senate is likely to act and then what.”
Ferrechio, my colleague, got clarification from a Boehner staffer:
A multi-year wind-down of Ex-Im is exactly what conservative Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Justin Amash proposed last Congress. The argument for a wind-down is that it would allow subsidized businesses a few years to adapt their business models to ones not so dependent on taxpayer-backed financing.
“We’d like to see the bank expire at the end of June,” Amash tells me, “but I would certainly support a wind-down bill. As long as, at the end of the day, this corporate welfare agency expires.”
Boehner has never before said he support a wind-down.
Boehner’s second argument against the let-it-die strategy also has a conservative undertone: It gives too much power to the Senate. If the House passes nothing, but the Senate passes a long-term reauthorization with no meaningful reforms, that puts Boehner, generally considered a fan of the agency, in the position of letting the agency die suddenly, or passing an overly generous reauthorization.
The pro-Ex-Im side is increasingly adopting the argument that letting the agency simply expire is irresponsible, regardless of Ex-Im’s merits. Behind closed doors on Wednesday, Ex-Im’s Senate champion Mark Kirk likened Ex-Im expiration to a government shutdown.
