Not only in the recent past, but still to this day, more than a few Republicans were literally smitten by South Dakota’s ex-congresswoman at large and current governor, Kristi Noem.
It probably goes without saying that while Noem certainly is a beautiful women, being a physically attractive public figure doesn’t necessarily equate to being an effective leader.
With that in mind, is Noem ready for the national spotlight? Rumors in The Swamp have bounced around that Noem has an outside chance to be on the bottom of the 2024 ticket.
Another fairly popular topic of political prestidigitators is that she just might be selected for a presidential cabinet assignment if and when the Republicans take back the White House in 2024.
Not so fast.
While she was curiously against it before she was for it, Noem vetoed in 2021 the bill that would gave effectively ended men competing in women’s sports in the Mt. Rushmore State.
As reported by the National Review in March of 2021 (emphasis mine);
After the overwhelmingly conservative legislature in South Dakota passed a bill to protect female athletes from being forced to compete against transgender-identified males, Governor Kristi Noem inappropriately used her “style-and-form” veto (typically reserved for small matters of punctuation) to significantly diminish the bill’s ambit.
The legislation would have upheld the biological definition of sex, ensuring that “any athletic team or sport” sponsored or sanctioned by a public school, school district, qualifying association, or institution of higher education would have to be “expressly designated” as either a male, female, or coed team. But after Noem’s changes, these protections are inapplicable at the collegiate level and meaningless anyway since she also removed a basic requirement for biological-sex verification.
Appearing on Fox News to justify her decision to an indignant Tucker Carlson, Noem claimed she acted after consulting with legal scholars for “many, many months” and had been “working on this issue for years.” In other words: Trust me, there’s a great strategy here!
Except that there isn’t. And whoever these legal scholars are, Noem would be advised to immediately dump them. Her veto, which made sweeping substantive changes rather than small stylistic ones, was a flagrant violation of her powers and sets an unwelcome precedent for future governors to abuse their powers in a similar way.
While she eventually did sign a second bill outlawing so-called transgendered men from competing in women’s sports, it was widely speculated that Noem initially buckled under pressure from the screamingly woke NCAA.
A bit closer to present day, Joshua Nybo of BizPacReview.com notes (emphasis mine);
Speaking to Fox News Digital before the speech itself, Noem noted that the theme would be to listen more, talk less, and cease the petty bickering. The central portion of her message was one sentence Noem delivered in remarks prepared before the speech in an interview with Fox News:
“My advice to the Republican Party is to get over yourself.”
“We all have people in our lives we have stopped talking to, we have been offended by, or believe they are too far at the other end of the political spectrum from us that there is no sense in wasting words on them. We need to get over ourselves. And start by listening,” Noem continued.
Here’s the fatal flaw in Noem’s advice; we conservatives are fed-up with keeping our mouths shut and being told we have to “listen more” to the other side while they sneer at us while trashing everything we hold dear.
That’s why we voted for Trump in the first place.
For the BEST patriotic shirts for the best patriots among us!
