In the chaos of a leaderless party and a massive budget deal, K Street Republicans, led by Tennessee Rep. Stephen Fincher, teamed up with Democrats to pass a bill Tuesday night to revive the defunct Export-Import Bank.
This bill’s passage certainly doesn’t guarantee the revival of Ex-Im, which subsidized foreign buyers of U.S.-made goods. It does pose an early test for presumptive Speaker Paul Ryan, though.
The background:
The Export-Import Bank was reauthorized in September 2014, but only for nine months. Most Senate Republicans (31 out of 54) have voted against renewing it this year, and most House Republicans want it dead, too. The majority leaders in both chambers — Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell — also favor letting Ex-Im expire. So do the relevant committee chairmen, Jeb Hensarling in the House and Richard Shelby in the Senate.
Given that firm opposition from the GOP’s majority and its leadership, Ex-Im’s charter expired June 30. The agency still exists, but is supposed to be liquidating. The White House, the manufacturing lobby, the bank lobby and congressional Democrats all lobbied furiously to revive it. So Congressman Fincher took up the flag to save Boeing’s Bank.
Fincher filed a discharge petition — a rarely successful parliamentary technique for circumventing the committee process and the majority leader.
Monday and Tuesday, Fincher and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi easily won the votes to pass their bill reviving Ex-Im and extending its charter for five years.
This is no guarantee the bill will become law. McConnell says he has no interest in bringing such a standalone Ex-Im bill to the Senate floor. Subsidy advocates could try to stick the bill into transportation funding, but that path didn’t work in June.
If Ex-Im is to be revived, it will probably take the cooperation of McConnell, McCarthy and presumptive speaker of the House, Paul Ryan — all of whom oppose Ex-Im.
So here’s the question: Who’s party is this? Is it Paul Ryan’s Party or Steve Fincher’s Party?
Ryan, for years, supported corporate welfare. Under Bush, Ryan voted for Ex-Im, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the Wall Street bailout and the Detroit bailout.
Since the late 2008 bailout bonanza, Ryan has had the zeal of a convert against corporate welfare. He wrote an op-ed in 2010 headlined “Down With Big Business,” channeling a famous Wall Street Journal editorial from the late 1970s.
“The problem we have had as a party,” he said, “is we have often confused being pro-market with being pro-business.”
He voted against Ex-Im in 2012, and became an outspoken opponent of it after that. He wants to reform the tax code to get rid of the complexity that “stifle[s] that entrepreneur who has an idea, who might not have connections.”
Paul Ryan is no libertarian ideologue, but he’s decided that fighting corporate welfare is essential to a defense of free enterprise and limited government.
Steve Fincher is also a convert. He was elected as a Tea Partier of sorts. He promised to “work for everyday Tennesseans, not the special interests. Trillion-dollar bailouts, bloated budgets and boondoggle spending packages aren’t working, at least for my friends and neighbors …”
Then he came to D.C. and went native. More than 90 percent of Fincher’s fundraising comes from corporate PACs and K Street lobbyists. As of the second quarter of this year, he had raised more from individuals at one lobbying firm than he had from all Tennessee residents combined.
All the biggest Ex-Im subsidy recipients fund Fincher through PAC checks. Fincher supports corporate welfare almost wherever it comes up: The sugar program and crop insurance are two more examples.
These corporate welfare programs have traditionally had broad Republican support. Since 2010, though, the GOP has moved away from being reflexively pro-business, and increasingly the party favors free enterprise over special-interest pleading.
Almost half of the party remains firmly planted in the K Street turf of the Bush-era party. Ryan has left that turf for the more economically and politically sound — if less rewarding in fundraising — position of supporting free enterprise.
Will Ryan take the party with him? As House speaker, he will undergo immense pressure from the business lobby to play ball. Past speakers went along with such pressure, in part because it never occurred to them to resist — it was assumed business was always an ally.
Paul Ryan knows better. Can he bring his party with him? Or will K Street and the likes of Fincher keep control over the GOP?
The Ex-Im fight will show us.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
