Nice to see the grown ups taking charge, for a change:
A small but powerful band of House Republicans rebelled against party leadership Monday night, a near-constant theme of Speaker John A. Boehner’s tenure the past five years.
Except these rebels didn’t comprise the usual 30 to 40 staunch conservatives who have agitated Boehner (R-Ohio) and helped prompt his decision a month ago to resign at the end of this week. This time an even larger bloc of Republicans who are reliable votes for the leadership team linked arms with Democrats for a highly unusual bid to revive an export subsidy agency that the conservatives had shut down over the summer.
Seething at the Export-Import Bank’s expiration, 62 Republicans voted with 184 Democrats Monday on a rarely used procedure to force a vote to reopen the bank with some modest reforms. Final passage will be Tuesday, sending the legislation to the Senate, where its outcome is unclear but where it counts the support of almost 70 of 100 senators.
“It helps create thousands of jobs,” Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R-Tenn.), the lead Republican pushing to force the vote, said during debate. He complained that Ex-Im Bank had fallen prey to the ideological fever that has left the House’s leadership in limbo for a month now, ending the agency’s ability to guarantee new sales for U.S. corporations to overseas clients.
It was a remarkable turnabout for the several dozen establishment Republicans, who have seen their agenda largely stymied by the House’s right flank. Yet the renewal of Ex-Im’s charter largely became possible because the right wing had so much success in helping oust Boehner and blocking the ascension of his top deputy, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Fincher filed the discharge position on Sept. 24, the day that Pope Francis gave his historic address to Congress and a day before Boehner’s bombshell.
“We knew we had to get more aggressive,” Fincher, a third-term lawmaker first elected in the tea party wave of 2010, recently told reporters. “And then the next day, I guess it was that Friday, he decided to retire, and so things really came unraveled.”
Counting the expected support of all 188 Democrats, Fincher’s group of Republicans needed 40 GOP signatures to reach the magic number of 218 to force a vote on Ex-Im.
What was expected to be a possibly slow-moving process turned very fast two weeks later when the conservative faction effectively blocked McCarthy’s bid for speaker.
The next morning, before they attended an emergency meeting of the House Republican Conference, Fincher and 41 Republicans marched to the House floor to sign the petition along with enough Democrats to put them over the top and set up this week’s votes.
They moved quickly enough to put the legislation on the floor before the new speaker, expected to be Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), could take the gavel later this week. Ryan is a strong opponent of the Ex-Im Bank. One of Ryan’s closest friends is Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the arch-conservative chairman of the House Financial Services Committee who has frozen any bid to renew the Ex-Im charter.
These petition efforts almost never succeed because in normal times it’s considered an act of extreme disloyalty for members of the majority to sign on with the other party over the leadership.
“At a time when our Republican Conference is divided, this will divide it even further. Signing a discharge petition — regardless of the issue — gives the Democrats control over our agenda,” Hensarling warned in a statement the day Fincher secured 218 supporters.
[Read Ted Cruz & Co. threaten war over Ex-Im Bank]
But with Boehner a lame duck, Ryan not yet in charge and McCarthy losing some clout, there was no leader that could stop the establishment Republicans from a rebellion of their own. Their theme was that they were using the rules of the House that were at their disposal. “This is all about regular order,” Fincher said Monday.
The far-right conservatives, who originally counted Ex-Im’s path toward closing a rare victory, are begrudgingly respectful of their internal Republican rivals.
“It’s frustrating. I thought that we had beat this thing,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a leader of the Freedom Caucus, the roughly 40-member group that has been Boehner’s biggest irritant, said. “I still think it’s bad policy. But the rules are the rules, and they used them.”
By almost every measure, it’s historical in nature. This is just the third time that all 218 signatures — a bare majority in the House — were procured on the same day, according to an Oct. 14 report by the Congressional Research Service.
Also, if the bank is ultimately revived, it would mark just the third time in history that a new law was passed by going entirely through the discharge petition route, CRS found. The other two laws were the first national minimum wage bill in the 1930s and a federal pay bill 55 years ago.
There have been 28 other instances in which a discharge petition successfully became law, but those times ended up with the House leadership giving in and negotiating a way for the bill to come to the floor under normal procedures. That’s what happened with the last discharge petition that reached 218 signatures, the 2002 McCain-Feingold law on campaign finances. Back then House GOP leaders, opposed to the law, put together a process to hold a 17-hour debate with several competing alternatives before the bill passed.
No such negotiation could settle the frayed House nerves this time. McCarthy tried over several meetings to hash out a compromise between Hensarling and Fincher.
Boehner has stayed quiet on his way out the door, but his position supporting the bank — thousands of jobs in his southwestern Ohio district are tied to its loans — has been clear all along.
Privately, Republican supporters of Ex-Im believe that the final passage vote could receive support from almost half the House Republicans. Then supporters will focus on getting another Senate vote.
If Ryan is able to forge unity, don’t expect many more successful discharge petitions. If he’s not and the conservative wing keeps causing trouble, this could become more commonplace.
“Yeah, it shows we can get something when we put our minds to it,” Fincher said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...c7b0fe-7bff-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html
A small but powerful band of House Republicans rebelled against party leadership Monday night, a near-constant theme of Speaker John A. Boehner’s tenure the past five years.
Except these rebels didn’t comprise the usual 30 to 40 staunch conservatives who have agitated Boehner (R-Ohio) and helped prompt his decision a month ago to resign at the end of this week. This time an even larger bloc of Republicans who are reliable votes for the leadership team linked arms with Democrats for a highly unusual bid to revive an export subsidy agency that the conservatives had shut down over the summer.
Seething at the Export-Import Bank’s expiration, 62 Republicans voted with 184 Democrats Monday on a rarely used procedure to force a vote to reopen the bank with some modest reforms. Final passage will be Tuesday, sending the legislation to the Senate, where its outcome is unclear but where it counts the support of almost 70 of 100 senators.
“It helps create thousands of jobs,” Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R-Tenn.), the lead Republican pushing to force the vote, said during debate. He complained that Ex-Im Bank had fallen prey to the ideological fever that has left the House’s leadership in limbo for a month now, ending the agency’s ability to guarantee new sales for U.S. corporations to overseas clients.
It was a remarkable turnabout for the several dozen establishment Republicans, who have seen their agenda largely stymied by the House’s right flank. Yet the renewal of Ex-Im’s charter largely became possible because the right wing had so much success in helping oust Boehner and blocking the ascension of his top deputy, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Fincher filed the discharge position on Sept. 24, the day that Pope Francis gave his historic address to Congress and a day before Boehner’s bombshell.
“We knew we had to get more aggressive,” Fincher, a third-term lawmaker first elected in the tea party wave of 2010, recently told reporters. “And then the next day, I guess it was that Friday, he decided to retire, and so things really came unraveled.”
Counting the expected support of all 188 Democrats, Fincher’s group of Republicans needed 40 GOP signatures to reach the magic number of 218 to force a vote on Ex-Im.
What was expected to be a possibly slow-moving process turned very fast two weeks later when the conservative faction effectively blocked McCarthy’s bid for speaker.
The next morning, before they attended an emergency meeting of the House Republican Conference, Fincher and 41 Republicans marched to the House floor to sign the petition along with enough Democrats to put them over the top and set up this week’s votes.
They moved quickly enough to put the legislation on the floor before the new speaker, expected to be Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), could take the gavel later this week. Ryan is a strong opponent of the Ex-Im Bank. One of Ryan’s closest friends is Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), the arch-conservative chairman of the House Financial Services Committee who has frozen any bid to renew the Ex-Im charter.
These petition efforts almost never succeed because in normal times it’s considered an act of extreme disloyalty for members of the majority to sign on with the other party over the leadership.
“At a time when our Republican Conference is divided, this will divide it even further. Signing a discharge petition — regardless of the issue — gives the Democrats control over our agenda,” Hensarling warned in a statement the day Fincher secured 218 supporters.
[Read Ted Cruz & Co. threaten war over Ex-Im Bank]
But with Boehner a lame duck, Ryan not yet in charge and McCarthy losing some clout, there was no leader that could stop the establishment Republicans from a rebellion of their own. Their theme was that they were using the rules of the House that were at their disposal. “This is all about regular order,” Fincher said Monday.
The far-right conservatives, who originally counted Ex-Im’s path toward closing a rare victory, are begrudgingly respectful of their internal Republican rivals.
“It’s frustrating. I thought that we had beat this thing,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a leader of the Freedom Caucus, the roughly 40-member group that has been Boehner’s biggest irritant, said. “I still think it’s bad policy. But the rules are the rules, and they used them.”
By almost every measure, it’s historical in nature. This is just the third time that all 218 signatures — a bare majority in the House — were procured on the same day, according to an Oct. 14 report by the Congressional Research Service.
Also, if the bank is ultimately revived, it would mark just the third time in history that a new law was passed by going entirely through the discharge petition route, CRS found. The other two laws were the first national minimum wage bill in the 1930s and a federal pay bill 55 years ago.
There have been 28 other instances in which a discharge petition successfully became law, but those times ended up with the House leadership giving in and negotiating a way for the bill to come to the floor under normal procedures. That’s what happened with the last discharge petition that reached 218 signatures, the 2002 McCain-Feingold law on campaign finances. Back then House GOP leaders, opposed to the law, put together a process to hold a 17-hour debate with several competing alternatives before the bill passed.
No such negotiation could settle the frayed House nerves this time. McCarthy tried over several meetings to hash out a compromise between Hensarling and Fincher.
Boehner has stayed quiet on his way out the door, but his position supporting the bank — thousands of jobs in his southwestern Ohio district are tied to its loans — has been clear all along.
Privately, Republican supporters of Ex-Im believe that the final passage vote could receive support from almost half the House Republicans. Then supporters will focus on getting another Senate vote.
If Ryan is able to forge unity, don’t expect many more successful discharge petitions. If he’s not and the conservative wing keeps causing trouble, this could become more commonplace.
“Yeah, it shows we can get something when we put our minds to it,” Fincher said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...c7b0fe-7bff-11e5-afce-2afd1d3eb896_story.html
