US President Barack Obama met with Senate Democrats on Tuesday night at the White House where he put the reauthorization of Ex-Im Bank right up there with Iran’s nuclear program as the most pressing matter. As mentioned here a few weeks ago, the best bet would be to piggyback the Highway Bill. But in a call with reporters yesterday Rep. Raúl Labrador, warned that attaching Ex-Im’s reauthorization to the highway bill would “make it more difficult” for the more than 40 members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus to vote for the legislation and if they did not then Ex-Im would lose the vote. “We’re going to use every procedural way of trying to separate both issues,” Labrador stated. “They shouldn’t be in the same bill anyway.” The worse case scenario is that both Ex-Im and the Highway Trust Fund are let to lapse over the coming month.
But while Boeing loses ground to Airbus, seven conservative Republican senators demanded last week that the Ex-Im Bank reveal any plans to commence liquidating its assets subsequent to the expiration of its charter during a period of inaction from Congress. Ex-Im Chairman Fred Hochberg disclosed that the staff at the bank were assembling a liquidation plan and completing $112bn in existing obligations. The operating budget of Ex-Im has been approved up to September 30.