Over at the Washington Post, Amber Phillips has a piece about the fight among Republicans about the Ex-Im Bank. I will spare you the line-by-line issues I have with the piece to focus on the part that seems the most biased to me. Here it is:

This time around, Republican opponents of the bank have a lot more friends — as in, nearly every GOP 2016 presidential candidate.
These new opponents join with what The Washington Post’s Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger describe as a fierce lobbying campaign by tea party-aligned groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth and mega-GOP donors Charles and David Koch to get rid of the bank.

The article makes no mentions of the fierce lobbying that the Chamber of Commerce, Boeing, Caterpillar and other giant beneficiaries have engaged in to save the bank for months now — and the support they’ve provided the bank for years. She mentions the Chamber of Commerce but doesn’t call its actions “fierce lobbying,” nor does she talk about the sheer amount all of these groups have spent of fighting Ex-Im.

Tim Carney at the Examiner notes that Boeing and GE, the two biggest Ex-Im beneficiaries, happen to have been the two biggest lobbying spenders in Washington over the last quarter (emphasis added):

About 40 percent of the financing the Export-Import Bank ships to foreign companies is to subsidize the purchase of Boeing jets. General Electric is No. 2 among Ex-Im Bank’s favorite exporters.
So it’s not too surprising that the two companies who spent the most on lobbying last quarter (April, May, and June) were No. 1 Boeing ($9.3 million), and No. 2 GE ($8.5 million).

That’s “fierce lobbying,” in my mind. If you add the money spent by the Chamber of Commerce, you would get fierce lobbying on steroids.

I wished the piece had mentioned that dimension of the fight, and then asked the more interesting question: Why is it that Boeing and the Chamber of Commerce’s money isn’t delivering its usual results for now? What’s changed?

In short, I think, while these guys will likely continue to win shorter-term political fights and get crony programs reauthorized, it will cost them more and more, and take up more and more of their attention, because the era of rubber-stamp cronyism is over. The Republican party has at times certainly been the party of business, and cronyism, but things are changing. There is now a core of Republican members in the House and the Senate who oppose and will continue to oppose (fiercely!) government-granted privileges. I’d argue their influence will grow and their number will expand, because their cause is consistent with the views of a growing number of Americans.

Thanks to these guys, the House will now vote on three-month highway bill, without an Ex-Im attached to it, and head home for summer recess on Wednesday. Assuming that happens, it means that the #EndExIm movement will once again win the day. The fight will be resumed in September, but the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has so far kept the promise he made back in June 2014 that he would oppose the Ex-Im Bank’s reauthorization.