So Be It: 110 Rank & File Republicans Vote to Strip Speaker Boehner's Jet Engine Earmark

As Dana Milbank explains in the Washington Post today, the GOP spending bill on the floor this week (HR 1) includes $450 million dollars for a jet engine the Pentagon didn't ask for and doesn't even want:

Among the savings proposed by the Obama administration (and before that, the Bush administration) is to end the wasteful effort to develop a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Pentagon is satisfied with the engine it has, made by Pratt & Whitney, and it doesn't want the second engine, made by General Electric and others. Eliminating the second engine would save $450 million this year and some $3 billion over 10 years.

But it just so happens that a GE plant that develops the second engine employs 7,000 people in Evendale, Ohio, near Boehner's district. Rather than take a so-be-it attitude toward jobs his constituents may hold, he's backing an earmark-like provision in the spending legislation to keep funding the unneeded GE engine.

"I believe that over the next 10 years this will save the government money," Boehner reasoned at his news conference.

This puts Boehner at odds with some members of his caucus, who, in a news conference half an hour after Boehner's, dismissed the speaker's wishful notion that the locally built engine would save money.

Despite Speaker Boehner's defense of the $450 million earmark for his home state, this afternoon rank and file Republicans voted to strip it from the GOP spending bill. Nearly half of the Republican caucus - 110 Republican members - joined the author of the amendment, Freshman Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), and 123 Democrats in voting to remove the wasteful spending from the bill. While Speaker Boehner did not vote, Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor voted in support of the earmark which also benefits his district.

Note: While we normally source and link vote counts on The Gavel, the Clerk's roll call website has not been updated with today's amendment votes. We will add the recorded vote link when it becomes available.