... is the destruction of government agencies by appointment. Time and again, the president has appointed and the Senate confirmed directors committed to the destruction of the agency they're directing and the inversion of its values. Think Scott Pruitt at the EPA, or Betsy DeVos at Education, or Ben Carson at HUD—the list, as you know, goes on and on.
Modern Republicanism being arrayed against the government's protection and advancement of the public interest, GOP senators have happily confirmed each such nominee who's come before them. Until this week.
On Tuesday, two Republican senators—South Dakota's Mike Rounds and South Carolina's Tim Scott—joined all their Democratic colleagues on the Senate Banking Committee to reject, by a 13-to-10 vote, Trump's pick of Scott Garrett, a former GOP House member from New Jersey, to head the Export-Import Bank. While in the House, Garrett had repeatedly and vociferously called for abolishing the bank, a position that would align him with such agency mission-reversers as DeVos and Pruitt. But this time, some Republicans demurred.
It was a revelatory demurral. The Export-Import Bank is one of those rare institutions whose work draws both intense support and intense opposition from American business. The Bank helps multinational corporations like Boeing (which has a plant in Scott's South Carolina) and General Electric find customers in distant lands by guaranteeing loans from foreign buyers. Not surprisingly, Boeing and GE lobbied furiously against Garrett's appointment. (Garrett insisted he'd had a conversion and now favored the Bank's continued existence, but Bank proponents clearly doubted his assurances.) The non-exporting sectors of American business have never warmed to the Bank, and pure laissez-faire conservatives have viewed it as an affront to the gods of market economics.
Placed alongside the Republicans' simultaneous enactment of the tax monstrosity, Garrett's rejection underscores a reliable guide to GOP behavior: When big business is united, Republicans give it what it wants (tax cuts, deregulation). When it's divided, so's the GOP.
