Boehner and Earmarks

Scott Lilly accuses John Boehner of adding pork to the budget to benefit his district with $450 million dollars of funding for a GE/Rolls Royce alternative engine to the selected Pratt & Whitney engine for the F-35:

The money will go to pay the costs to General Electric Co.’s General Electric Aviation unit and the British-owned Rolls Royce Group for their development of an engine for the new Joint Strike Fighter aircraft—money that looks, feels, and smells very much like an earmark.
Should the Department of Defense end up paying the two companies to develop the engine it is hoped that they will then buy significant numbers of them for the aircraft. The problem that the Pentagon has with this plan for using tax dollars is that they already have an engine for the plane—an engine that was decided on when the contract for production of the plane was agreed to 10 years ago.
But that does not deter union leaders, company executives, and local government officials in Dayton and Cincinnati from arguing their case. At a rally held at one of GE’s Ohio facilities last October, the company announced the addition of 500 new jobs at the Cincinnati and Dayton plants and emphasized the importance of congressional action to override Pentagon objections to the program. A story from the October 22 edition of the Dayton Business Journal entitled “GE’s fighter engine ‘a huge issue’ for Tri-State economy” reported:

The Pentagon insists GE’s second engine isn’t needed, that it has no use for it, and that further development is a waste of money. But the engine’s supporters in Congress—and Evendale, where GE employs more than 7,000—beg to differ...“It’s a huge issue. There’s a lot at risk here,” said Gary Jordan, president of United Aerospace Workers Local 647.

I'll go out on a limb and guess that Boehner didn't put that item in, either Mike Turner, Sherrod Brown or Rob Portman did.  So far as I have heard, Boehner never goes for pork, but he never fights fellow Ohioans who do.  Actually, he might fight Brown, but I don't think he'll fight Republicans.