The Export-Import bank is slated to die on Tuesday night, and conservatives are shoveling hard to dig a deep grave.

“It is a culturally corrupt organization,” said Rep. Bill Flores of Texas, who chairs the conservative Republican Study Committee. “It is the worst of the federal government. It is the Enron of federal [government-owned companies]. And it’s gotta go away.”


But for Washington institutions, death can be just a first step toward rebirth: Democrats, along with a handful of GOP lawmakers, are already laying the groundwork to resurrect the bank, as soon as the end of July. They’ll push to renew the bank’s charter, which expires on June 30, after which the bank would not be able to make any new loan guarantees.

Over the past several years, Ex-Im has emerged from relative anonymity to become a top target for conservative Republicans, who say the bank’s loan guarantees for U.S. exporters amount to corporate welfare. Just last week, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity organized a news conference for top-tier presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to rail against the bank. Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) hasn’t stopped his two top deputies from plotting to eliminate the agency, as the right has made the issue a reliable litmus test for presidential hopefuls and congressional candidates.

It’s a stunning fate for the obscure government financier — the bank was renewed by Congress in 2006 without even a roll-call vote in either chamber. And while the bank is warning lawmakers the expiration jeopardizes $9 billion in financing and nearly 200 projects, the right is set for a celebration Tuesday night when the calendar turns and Ex-Im temporarily loses the ability to arrange new loans for the first time in its 81-year history.

Despite the conservative excitement, Democrats are about to cash in on a promise from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the chamber will vote on renewing the bank this summer. And he told reporters an imminent, and must-pass, highway bill is the “obvious” place for an amendment vote.

Transportation funding runs dry on July 31 and Republicans are loath to miss that deadline in the middle of the summer construction season, particularly after they blew a deadline earlier this spring and allowed key provisions of the PATRIOT Act to lapse for two days. A recent test vote showed there are 65 senators in favor of reauthorizing the bank.

“Looks to me like they have the votes, and I’m going to give them the opportunity,” McConnell told The Associated Press on Monday.

But even if the Senate votes to revive the bank, the House will be a much bigger hurdle to its long-term survival, where opposition to Ex-Im is firmly entrenched within Flores’ 170-member conservative group.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) has asked Boehner to commit to voting on whatever passes the Senate later this summer. But Boehner has resisted drawing lines in the sand, committing instead to House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) that the House will be allowed to amend any Export-Import Bank revival that clears the upper chamber.

“The only commitment the speaker has made on the Export Import Bank is to Chairman Hensarling, who asked that — if the Senate attached Ex-Im to a ‘must pass’ bill and sent it over to the House — he be allowed to offer amendments under an open process,” Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said Monday.

Furthermore, the scorched-earth campaign being run by conservative groups, particularly the Club for Growth, has annoyed a handful of House Republicans who have been targeted for backing “corporate welfare,” though the group contends the ads swayed some undecided GOP votes. Some of those targeted by the Club were already planning to oppose the bank.

Still, the tactics of the Club, Heritage Action and other groups on the right have House Republicans keeping their powder dry: Just 60 Republicans are co-sponsoring the House’s bill to extend the bank’s life, and only three GOP members have signed on since the bill was introduced in late January.

Other Republicans say they are looking for a path to yes but just can’t find one. Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) said he wants to modify the bank so that it isn’t used as often for large corporations’ benefit and it backs off its “ideological warfare” on his state’s coal industry.

“Get rid of those two things and I can support it,” McKinley said. “But it ain’t gonna happen.”

Added Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah): “I wanted to get to yes if we could. But at the end of the day we just didn’t have the reforms that we thought were meaningful.”

That queasiness will make it difficult for many Republicans to resurrect the bank without a significant overhaul to how it operates. Critical House Republicans are likely push for short-term extensions of the bank’s charter rather than the four-year timeline preferred by Ex-Im backers in the Senate and to shrink its economic blueprint.

As a way to demonstrate to the business community that Congress would not permanently bury the credit agency, the Senate held a nonbinding Ex-Im vote in June that showed 65 senators — including 22 Republicans — backed the agency. That’s enough votes to easily break a Senate filibuster and advance a measure.

Democrats, along with a handful of GOP lawmakers, are already laying the groundwork to resurrect the bank, as soon as the end of July. | Getty

In the House, more than 240 lawmakers — including nearly all Democrats — have co-sponsored different bills that reauthorize the bank in some form, although there are key differences among the measures.

Though the Export-Import Bank appears likely to be restored by July’s end in some form — a blow to conservatives — Republicans still have major leverage with an expired charter that may leave proponents desperate to make a deal to reopen the bank. Knowing that, bank proponents pushed so hard and vocally for a vote on Ex-Im before its expiration — but they stopped short of attaching it to a recently passed fast-track trade bill, which could have killed the fragile coalition that sent the trade package to President Barack Obama’s desk for his signature on Monday.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, was recently pessimistic on the chances of reviving the bank, noting that the task gets “increasingly difficult” once the charter has expired.

In May, Democrats and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) refused to vote for that fast-track trade bill until McConnell reassured them that there will be an opportunity for the Senate to revive Ex-Im by attaching it to a mutually agreeable legislative vehicle. That prompted the symbolic vote earlier this month.

But that vote has caused tension between McConnell and Democrats like Cantwell, who has suggested that was not what she had in mind when she voted to advance the trade legislation over a liberal-led filibuster. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) had an animated discussion during the Senate’s second trade vote last week, with Heitkamp arguing that the Ex-Im clearly has the votes to pass the Senate.

“We know that there were commitments made, or understandings, that weren’t necessarily carried through on,” Heitkamp fumed late last week as GOP leaders pointed to that nonbinding vote. “I don’t know how anyone can look at that and say that was a fulfillment of a commitment.”

Republicans say they’ve upheld their end of the bargain.

“Sen. McConnell had told Sen. Cantwell that she would get an opportunity to offer an amendment on a bill that’s moving across the floor. And I think she’ll have that opportunity,” Cornyn said.

But a temporary death of the agency is not the victory that conservatives have been seeking, said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action for America, an organization that is urging Boehner and McConnell to permanently wind down the bank by fending off a vote from the floor of either chamber. Heritage Action and the Club say the only way Republicans can shrink government is to let the bank expire altogether — and the wind is at the GOP’s back if they choose to do so.

“Everything that proponents of the bank say is harder than they say … they are trying to make it sound like a foregone conclusion that it will be on this highway bill,” Holler said. “Literally, all the Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate has to do is clock a win on this.”