The Senate GOP makes a convincing case not to advance President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Yet the same conviction is absent in Republicans’ unrelenting push to restore the embodiment of crony capitalism.
We refer, of course, the somnambulistic Export-Import Bank, which Congress reauthorized late last year after first allowing its charter to lapse. This dubious government largess of first resort doles out taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees to foreign countries and corporations to buy U.S. goods. Apologists argue the bank helps small U.S. businesses.
But operating without a board majority, the bank, by law, cannot approve transactions of more than $10 million.
So, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby to advance a White House bank board nomination, on hold since January. Restoring the board’s majority will lift the loan limit and open Export-Import’s taxpayer coffers to massive regulars such as Boeing and General Electric.
“Ex-Im actually harms small business by providing their overseas competitors with financing at artificially low rates,” writes Heritage Foundation scholar Diane Katz.
So, the GOP stands on principle regarding a Supreme Court nominee but abandons the same to advance a purely political, impractical entity that should have died with the Great Depression. How pathetic.
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