The bank, founded in 1934, has seen its charter renewed two dozen times without controversy or fanfare, but things are different in this highly political year. Reauthorization efforts stalled in the Senate in March over a partisan squabble, and faced an uncertain future in the House as Republicans were pressured by business allies who say the bank is crucial to export sales financing, and influential conservative organizations who argue it distorts markets and picks winners and losers.

The Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America declared that the Ex-Im Bank bill would be a “key vote,” meaning that lawmaker votes would become part of the groups’ scorecards determining their conservative credentials.

But business groups such as the U.S Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers lobbied on the bank’s behalf, and appear to have prevailed. Last month 30 of the House’s more conservative members wrote the GOP leadership calling for the bank’s reauthorization, saying that, while in a perfect world such export financing might not be necessary, “it seems counterproductive to unilaterally disengage” when foreign governments are actively promoting overseas sales.

House passage, and likely Senate action before the end of the month, would give bipartisanship a rare victory at a time when Congress seems unable to come up with solutions to partisan battles over student loans, extension of the Violence Against Women Act and a long-term highway and infrastructure spending bill.

The House bill was crafted, after weeks of negotiations, by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

It requires that the bank be more transparent in its dealings — a Republican demand — and requires the bank to show that its loans and loan guarantees are needed because the private sector would not undertake the risk or because of competition from foreign export credit agencies. It demands that all companies doing business with the bank certify that they do not do business with Iran.

The measure also responds to a dispute between Boeing Co., the bank’s biggest beneficiary, and Delta Air Lines, which has claimed that it is losing business because of Ex-Im Bank loan assistance to foreign airlines buying new Boeing aircraft. It directs the Treasury secretary to initiate multilateral negotiations on reducing and eventually eliminating government export subsidies for aircraft.

After the compromise was announced last Friday, both Boeing and Delta came out with positive statements. Delta said that, if implemented appropriately, the revised bill “addresses Ex-Im’s current, flawed policy of favoring foreign airlines over domestic airlines and their employees.”

The Ex-Im Bank, which operates without taxpayer money. It financed about $11 billion worth of Boeing’s large commercial sales. The bank says its financing, mostly in the form of loan guarantees but also in direct loans and credit insurance, supported 290,000 jobs, including 85,000 aerospace jobs.

The bank provides export financing support for about 2 percent of U.S. exports, well below the financial backing offered by other countries. China’s export promotion agencies provide about 10 times the financing of the U.S. bank.

Democrats raised this point in chiding Republicans for their indecision on the bank. “As Republicans wring their hands in a stale ideological debate over whether to support American exports, China and other countries are significantly increasing their assistance to help their domestic companies compete abroad,” said Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees trade.

The bank’s current charter expires at the end of this month. At about the same time, the institution will hit its statutory lending cap of $100 billion.

In March, Senate Democrats proposed renewing the bank’s charter for four years and raising the lending cap to $140 billion. But when they tried to attach that to a bill promoting small business investment, Republicans rebelled and shot it down.

Republicans said they were happy to take up the bank’s renewal as a separate measure subject to a few amendments, but didn’t want it slowing down passage of the small business bill, a GOP favorite. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., insisted, saying the renewal needed to be attached to the small business measure, or another bill heading for passage, to have a chance of getting through the House.

Since then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who originally sought a shorter and more restrictive reauthorization, and the House’s second-ranked Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, have been trying to negotiate a deal that can satisfy the bank’s House critics while still being acceptable to the Senate.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive vice president Bruce Josten wrote lawmakers that failure to find a solution and extend the bank’s life “would amount to unilateral disarmament in the face of other nations’ aggressive trade finance programs.”

“Whether you like it or not, other countries are Export-Import Bank on steroids,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose state of South Carolina is manufacturing Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. “If we just get out of this business, companies like Boeing will be unable to sell their airplanes.”

Graham and others point out that while the Ex-Im Bank provided $32 billion in financing last year, its counterpart agency in Canada financed three times that amount and China backed up its exports with some $300 billion in financing.

The Export-Import Bank provides financing support for about 2 percent of U.S. exports, stepping in when private banks leery of more risky foreign sales are reluctant to offer the credit the U.S. company needs for working capital or the foreign buyer needs to secure a loan. Most of its support comes in the form of loan guarantees, but it also offers direct loans and credit insurance.

The bank says that its transactions supported some 290,000 American jobs at no cost to taxpayers. It operates through fees and interest charged its customers and over the past five years has paid $1.9 billion into the Treasury.

Still, conservative groups such as the Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America are urging lawmakers to reject Ex-Im Bank reauthorization and have made it a “key vote” in how they rate lawmakers’ records. The groups say the bank distorts markets and picks winners and losers in the private sector. “Not only should members of Congress reject this expansion of authority, but they should reject the bank’s charter and shut it down for good,” the Club for Growth said.

It’s not the first time Republicans have been pulled in opposite directions by small-government devotees on one side and their business friends or constituents on the other. A similar situation arose on a still-pending bill to finance highways and other infrastructure and on legislation to keep federal student loan interest rates low. In this case, the conservatives’ ties to the business community appear to be winning out.

In late April, 30 House Republicans wrote Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner that “as conservatives, we believe it is imperative that Congress move forward with a multiyear reauthorization of Ex-Im that provides certainty and stability for U.S. manufacturers and exporters as soon as possible.” They said that, while in a perfect world there would be no need for this type of export financing, “it seems counterproductive to unilaterally disengage.”

They also noted that more than 700 small businesses were among the companies that used the bank for the first time last year, echoing the bank’s assertions that it is far more than “Boeing’s bank.”

Last year 87 percent of the bank’s transactions directly benefited small business, a total of $6 billion in export-financing support. At the same time the bank helped finance about $11 billion worth of Boeing’s large commercial sales, supporting 85,000 aerospace jobs and assuring that Boeing can compete on a more equal footing with Airbus.

But it also eases the way for foreign carriers, such as Air India, to buy Boeing’s newest aircraft, and Delta argues that this has resulted in it being squeezed out of some markets, to the detriment of its workforce.

The airline is not against Ex-Im reauthorization, said Delta spokesman Trebor Banstetter. But he said the bank needs to be more transparent in its dealings and assure that its analyses of how financing affects employment extend to airline employees as well as aircraft manufacturers. He also urged the government to open negotiations with Europe on finding a way for both sides to get out of the business of export credit for aircraft sales.

But before getting a bill to the president, lawmakers must satisfy multiple constituents with different agendas — northern corn growers, southern cotton farmers, insurance companies, banks, nutrition groups and environmentalists. Most difficult will be narrowing the gap between the Democratic Senate and House Republicans taking aim at the food stamp program that comprises some 80 percent of the bill’s spending.

Farmers are also cursed by their own successes. With farm incomes as high as they’ve been in decades, it’s harder to convince lawmakers that they still need strong protections for future disasters and market downturns.

Most give chances of success at no better than 50-50, which frustrates farm groups seeking some certainty in government policy. There’s still seven months to work on a bill before the presidential election, said Jon Doggett, vice president for public policy at the National Corn Growers Association. “Our membership is getting extremely concerned to hear members say we can’t pass a farm bill this year. There are a lot of growers who are really very very angry.”

The Congressional Budget Office says that at the current spending pace the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, would spend about $400 billion over the five-year life of a farm bill enacted this year. Crop insurance subsidies would average about $9 billion a year, commodity subsidies $6.6 billion and farm conservation programs $6.5 billion.

Last fall, when the congressional supercommittee was making its futile attempt to come up with a long-term deficit reduction plan, Senate agriculture committee chairman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and her Republican colleague in the House, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, came up with a plan to cut $23 billion from farm and food aid over the next decade while replacing direct payments to farmers with a new revenue insurance program. That plan is the framework as the agriculture committee’s draft of the massive bill that also includes such areas as energy, forestry, rural development and international food aid.

The Barack Obama administration in its budget proposal this year outlined a similar plan, calling for cuts of $32 billion and also eliminating direct payments, a subsidy that farmers collect based on a land’s production history but not connected to crop prices or yield.

But the GOP-led House sees farm and food aid as a prime source for deficit reduction, and the budget of Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that cleared the House last month requires almost $180 billion in cuts from farm bill programs over the next decade. That included $134 billion, or an average $13.4 billion a year, from the food stamp or SNAP program.

As part of that, the House agriculture committee on Wednesday approved $7.7 billion in reductions for next year, or $33 billion over a decade, to the SNAP program to help avoid automatic cuts in defense and other programs next year.

Republicans argued that spending for SNAP, which has grown from 17 million recipients in 2001 to more than 46 million today, is bloated by waste and fraud and can be reduced without taking food away from the needy.

But Democrats are strongly opposed to anything more than marginal cuts to the food stamp program and saw the Ryan budget as a major deterrent to getting a farm bill this year. “Passing a farm bill this year was already going to be difficult but the Republican budget approved by the House today lowers the odds,” the top Democrat on the House agriculture committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, said after the budget vote.

“Farmers and ranchers are fiscally conservative and definitely want to contribute as much as they can to deficit reduction,” said Chandler Goule of the National Farmers Union. But he said the entire farm bill with nutrition is still only about 2 percent of the federal budget and farmers are already bearing more than their fair share with the $23 billion in cuts proposed last year. “The government needs to go somewhere else to find additional money … that’s what our producers think,” he said.

House committee chairman Lucas voted for the Ryan budget, but said in a statement that he “would caution people about reading too much into the numbers or policy proposals in either the president’s budget or the Ryan budget …. they are only suggestions.” He stressed on Wednesday that his committee’s proposed cuts in SNAP “would improve its integrity so that families most in need can continue to receive nutrition assistance.”

The main focus of the Senate debate on the bill will be reaching a consensus on the future safety net for commodities. Direct payments, now costing $5 billion a year, are likely to be replaced with some form of “shallow loss” program that would pay farmers when modestly decreasing yields or declining prices result in a farmer’s revenue falling below historic averages.

For more serious losses, crop insurance kicks in. An average 60 percent of crop insurance premiums are subsidized by the government.

Corn and soybean farmers are strong advocates of this approach, which would help maintain their current economic prosperity, while southern growers of rice, cotton and peanuts prefer the more traditional counter-cyclical payments where target prices are set and farmers are compensated when those prices aren’t reached.

If no deal is reached by September, Congress will need to extend the existing bill, and that too will not be easy. Both the 2002 and 2008 farm bills were passed after one-year extensions, and Congress has had to extend the transportation bill, another huge piece of legislation that has defied compromise, nine times since the old act expired in 2009.

But most agree that the House would not extend the farm bill without exacting cuts in existing programs. “I strongly suspect there will be some kind of penalty price to be paid,” said Mary Kay Thatcher of the American Farm Bureau Federation, saying that that could come in the form of cuts to direct payments or food stamps.