It is becoming increasingly obvious that a Senate majority when led by a weak and fearful old woman (NTTAWWT) like Mitch McConnell has the spine of a jelly fish and the steely edge of a nerf ball.

McConnell, incredibly, it folding a winning hand and letting the minority party dictate the terms of the GOP surrender.’

If that weren’t bad enough, our alleged majority is filled with self-dealers and porkers who believe that your hard-earned money should be wasted in a way calculated to buy them influence. Case in point Lindsey Graham. In Graham’s defense, no one has ever believed him to be a conservative but good governance should be something even squish Republicans can get behind. I mean ostensibly his reason for grabbing his ankles — other than pure reflex — in the DHS fight was just that. Rather than support limited government, or even try to excise as much corruption as possible from a larger government, Graham has launched a full-throated defense of the Export-Import Bank… to the extent that he’s declared opposition to be against conservative principles.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Wednesday there’s “no way in hell” he will let the Export-Import Bank shut down.

Graham also said opposition to the bank “makes no friggin’ sense.”

Graham made the remarks at a Washington forum hosted by a broad coalition of officials from nearly 700 businesses that are in town this week urging lawmakers to reauthorize the bank’s charter.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) has pushed to end the bank’s charter, arguing it picks winners and losers and is an example of Washington “corporate welfare.” Without a reauthorization by June 30, the bank would shut down.

Two of the bank’s beneficiaries, Boeing and G.E., have a strong presence in Graham’s home state. Both have manufacturing plants in South Carolina.

“There’s no way in hell I’m going back to South Carolina and say, ‘Hey we shut down a bank because people ideologically objected to the bank and the reason you’ve lost these plants is because companies overseas doing the exact same thing have a bank,’” Graham said at a Washington forum hosted by businesses that support the bank.

He said that the Tea Party’s criticism “makes no friggin’ sense to me, quite frankly, that we’re even having this discussion given the way the world really is.”

This statement simply goes to show that Graham is either totally unmoored from objective reality or he’s simply trying to use your tax dollars to buy influence in South Carolina. The US Export-Import Bank is a country club that most businesses can never belong to. It guarantees loans to companies that simply do not need the help. The major beneficiaries are Boeing, Caterpillar, Bechtel, and General Electric. But the Ex-Im Bank is open to other customers. It has made loans to Mexican drug cartel front companies and to Russian oligarchs.

But Graham said at the Washington forum that it wasn’t conservative to shut down the bank. He argued other countries have government-backed banks meant to promote domestic companies.

“Shutting this bank down in light of what other countries like China and France do is unilaterally surrendering to foreign opposition? That’s not remotely conservative,” Graham said at the forum, which was hosted by Bloomberg.

Neither France nor China are particularly conservative so how imitating them would be conservative escapes me. The problems Boeing and other American firms have in closing big dollar deals in developing countries has nothing to do with whether or not there is an Ex-Im Bank. The decisions are made based on the perceived political advantage of doing business with the United States and what the US company is able to legally contribute to the lifestyle of the idiot cousin of some government minister.

Simply put, the Ex-Im Bank is crony capitalism. Most of the money goes to companies who can afford battalions of fluffers who fan out over Capitol Hill and try to convince the demented and corrupt that the US economy benefits from this institution.