Instapundit points to an article on SD Governor Kristi Noem’s EOs following her veto of the legislature’s bill that would ban men from playing women’s sports. (Let’s call a spade a spade; “transgender” is a bullshit term and we all know it.)
After failed negotiations between South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem and the state’s House lawmakers, the governor issued two executive orders Monday designed to limit participation on women’s and girls’ school sports teams to people assigned female at birth.
Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill restricting transgender athletes from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. After signaling support — even excitement — for the bill, Noem declined to sign it over concerns the law would not survive legal challenges. Instead, she asked lawmakers to revise the legislation’s language. Major conservative backlash ensued and on Monday, South Dakota lawmakers failed to come to an agreement.
“Only girls should play girls’ sports,” Noem tweeted Monday evening. “Given the legislature’s failure to accept my proposed revisions to HB 1217, I am immediately signing two executive orders to address this issue: one to protect fairness in K-12 athletics, and another to do so in college athletics.”
Neither of the governor’s orders mention transgender athletes specifically but Mark Miller, the governor’s general counsel, says because legislators did not approve Noem’s changes to the bill, she issued the orders as a temporary fix.
(My emphasis.)
I wondered about this from the start. It sounds to me like Gov. Noem recognized there were problems with the bill that would make it hard to defend if challenged in court, tried to work those problems out with the legislature, and when the legislature balked, she vetoed. Now she has two EOs out that more or less deal with the issue and all but guarantee the NCAA won’t penalize the state (which it could do with impunity, since SD is small potatoes in the NCAA’s grand criminal* scheme).
The commenters at Instapundit are mostly full of shit, which is a shame because they don’t want to admit they were wrong about Kristi Noem. Calling her a flip-flopper is just an insult. (Comparing her to Nikki Haley is grounds to be challenged to a duel.) The first two paragraphs of the linked article ought to put paid to that, but it seems the right is rapidly becoming as rabid as the commies over ideological purity. (I mean, how many times did Trump piss you off, and you still identify as Trump supporters? He pissed me off plenty, but I still voted for his re-election.)
If you’re still pissed off at Kristi Noem over this, you need to think about WHY she vetoed the bill. Sometimes a bad bill is just a bad bill. We’ve grown so used to the idea of the veto power being used negatively, it seems we no longer recognize when the veto power is used positively.
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*For what it’s worth, I hate the NCAA with a passion, and have ever since the late Myles Brand, may he rot in hell where he belongs, took it over.