Stephen Lee Fincher leads Ex-Im Bank revival by bucking House Republican leaders

Dozens of House Republicans bucked their own leaders Monday and cued up votes to revive the federal Export-Import Bank, an obscure credit agency that is on life support amid conservative complaints that it handed out “corporate welfare” for far too long.

Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher, Tennessee Republican, leveraged a rarely used discharge petition to force reauthorization votes this week, enraging conservatives, who said the signers were brazenly skirting the way the majority party should vet legislation.

Members voted 246-177 to discharge the petition out of committee and onto the floor, even though powerful Republican members — including Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who is expected to be the next speaker — want to kill off the bank.

Sixty-two Republicans and every Democrat who voted Monday backed the little-known agency, a product of the New Deal that financed the sale of U.S. goods overseas for decades until its charter lapsed June 30.

Known as “Ex-Im,” the bank enjoys majority support in both chambers of Congress, its supporters argue, and companies such as General Electric have already cut jobs, citing turmoil at the agency. Other nations finance exports to keep their firms competitive, so the U.S. should keep doing it too, they said.

“I know it is not easy, as Republicans, to do this, but it is the right thing to do,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Illinois Republican, said in debate that elicited cheers and jeers from both sides of the aisle.

Mr. Fincher’s petition quickly gathered the 218 signatures — 42 Republicans and 176 Democrats — needed to make a discharge petition viable when he circulated the measure earlier this month.

Yet by going around House leadership, he enraged Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who said Ex-Im’s Republican supporters effectively handed control of the chamber to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, and her troops.

From the floor, he blasted the petition’s drafters for bypassing his committee and preventing members of either party from amending the bill.

“Why punish the entirety of the House?” he said, adding that it trampled on regular order. “Why not let the House work its will?”

Mr. Hensarling said if Democrats were so concerned about jobs, they would have resisted Obamacare and supported the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

President Obama would gladly sign an Ex-Im reauthorization, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, opposes the bank and is loath to revisit it after the Senate attached Ex-Im to its highway bill in July and passed it by a 64-29 vote, and then watched it die in the House.

“We’ve said publicly and repeatedly that the leader is not going to spend a week of floor time on a bill he doesn’t support,” McConnell spokesman Donald Stewart said.

Right-leaning groups tried to change minds in the run-up to House maneuvers Monday. They said no disasters have happened without the bank and that GE and other companies are using the agency’s lapse as a scapegoat for its layoffs and outsourcing of jobs to overseas factories.

“A single mom, working two jobs to put food on the table, shouldn’t be forced to subsidize corporate profits, and lawmakers shouldn’t cave to empty threats that turn employees into political bargaining chips,” Freedom Partners spokesman James Davis said.

Formal efforts to derail Mr. Fincher’s bid had little effect, however. At first, House opponents said the motion should have been made immediately after the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer.

“This motion is no longer timely,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney, South Carolina Republican, said late Monday, citing written rules on discharge petitions.

After some confusion, the presiding member determined that the petition “may” be brought up immediately after the Pledge but didn’t have to be.