House members throwing rocks at Governor over coalition building & Style and Form revisions of House Bill 1217

@SoDakCampaigns

On Facebook this afternoon, Speaker of the House Spencer Gosch issued a statement that went after Governor Noem for her style and form revisions of House Bill 1217, limiting the application of the measure to K-12 students, and stripping the measure of how it could affect South Dakota’s participation in the NCAA.

While Noem legal team reviewed the measure, Gosch countered that “lawyers from national organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom spent months writing the legislation that ultimately passed the legislative process,” and sharply attacked the Governor, boasting “we brought a bill, she brought a website.”  The problem with Gosch’s attack on the Governor? Legislating is easy, especially when an out-of-state group hands you a bill.  But the devil – and the lawsuits – are in the implementation. The bill as written had some portions that were frankly big government.

And after looking at the measure with her own legal team, Kristi decided that was more than the Governor was willing to do, as spelled out in her style and form veto message.

Governor Noem represents all of South Dakota. And she has to take into account a lot more opinions than just those of the 20% hard right.

No matter how conservative a Governor may be, they still have to govern with practicality of how something will be carried out.  I get the impression that the Governor looked farther down the line than just the next 2 weeks, and ran up against some problems in implementation.

Shouldn’t the Governor be concerned if a bill as written might cause dozens of lawsuits and cost the state jobs?  Well, yes. And it sounds like she did.    Especially when this is not a situation where we are actively facing the question at the moment. We literally would be falling on our sword for the smoky suppositions of what could happen.

In the instance of 1217, the Governor split the difference, allowing portions of the measure to move forward in the state, and at the same time, allowing others to litigate out the other portions, while advocating that states band together when they negotiate with entities such as the NCAA.

I don’t think that’s a bad place for our state to be.

At least, it doesn’t seem like it should be an issue for legislators to throw rocks at the Governor over.

29 thoughts on “House members throwing rocks at Governor over coalition building & Style and Form revisions of House Bill 1217”

  2. No rational lawyer thinks this was a style and form veto.

    The problem isn’t just that she veto’d it …she wants to have it both ways….

    1. Part of the reason our society is crumbling each day is that people are constantly threatened with lawsuits. The far left radicals know this and keep up their bizarre attacks on what is right and good.

  3. “And she has to take into account a lot more opinions than just those of the 20% hard right.”

    Umm . . .

    Since when does 70 out of 105 votes equal 20%? Seems to me it equals a two-thirds majority.

    Be where you may on the isseu, the fact is this passed with the support of 70 legislators.

      1. According to a recent scientific poll of 600 South Dakotans, 58% support the bill. The margin or error was + or – 4%.

            1. The people in the poll are like me. I trusted the bill said what the sponsors and the title said it did.

              Retired Judge and former legislator Ron Miller of Kimball read every single bill word for word before he voted on it. Every one.

              And he told me “There is a lot of crap that sounds good until you read it. I should have remembered that lesson.

  4. In fact, both Greenfield and Beal were excused; so the actual vote was 70/103 = 68%. Both have indicated support if they would have been present. So the actual legislative support would have been 72/105.

    1. If passing it ‘as is’ – to solve a problem we don’t have – costs the state 1000 Amazon jobs, strips sports teams of participating in NCAA sports, and causes a series of lawsuits – I suspect that voters might not think it’s ‘all that’ and a bowl of candy when elections come around. Especially in Sioux Falls.

      1. So Amazon, and the NCAA are now running the state. Hpe we pass future legislative proposals by them for their approval before voting.

        1. The SD & SF Chamber of Commerce could be added to the list of organizations that think they run the state? The SF CoC was also against SB 177.

  6. First, I am a father of three high school girls athletes and understand the biological need for separate sports.

    Second, to be clear, if you go back and read several different threads, I was one of the most vigorous defenders of the intent of protecting girls sports. I am the one who found the reality our fastest high school boys 200 meter times are better than the greatest female track athlete’s Olympic time (FloJo). I am the one who found a formerly mediocre male high school athlete had better times than the best SDSU women track athlete. I am unequivocal in my support of the intent.

    That said, every year the legislature says “the Governor is too powerful” and “the Legislature has to fulfill their Constitutional role as a coequal branch. And then, then left to their own devices they pass this piece of crap.

    Maybe Governor Noem should have stepped in earlier to do this right. But, if she had, when is the legislature ever going to be able to do their job if they can’t get something this simple right? This Letter intended to criticize the Governor only turned the spotlight on the Legislature and it isn’t pretty.

    1. Troy, why don’t you just admit men are better than women? That’s what Title IX does, it admits that boys are better at these things than the girls are, the girls can’t compete with the boys, so they need to have their own athletic programs, sort of like Special Olympics.

  7. Mr. Gosch is insaner than most, and isn’t even the Haugaard-lite he’s trying to be. He’s a large, yet insigificant blip in the legislatures.

  8. I hope she signs it. This is a battle that has been coming and long overdue. It will be fun watching what will happen.

  10. The same argument about litigation could be made about any anti-abortion bill that comes before the legislature. Banning abortion based on the tests that project a baby may be born with Downs Syndrome will also be tested in court and will probably also lose. But, we passed that bill (rightfully I think) and the Governor signed it. The only diference is that the NCAA and Amazon are not protesting it. She caved and so did South Dakota.

  11. Leftist culture revisionists revel when conservatives fight amongst themselves

    Let’s work together to protect girls sports at the elementary and secondary school level right now while we build a coalition of states and athletes that can challenge the NCAA in the court of public opinion to stop bullying individual states into compliance with threats of exclusion of their athletes and exclusion of states from hosting NCAA events.

    Let’s together stop any possible erosion of girls (elementary and secondary school) Title IX rights within our state first, and now. Legislative concurrence with the revisions suggested by Governor Noem or the drafting and passage of a new bill to that end will accomplish that now.

    Then let’s not fail to lead the way to assemble a coalition to take on the NCAA from a position of strength better than we have now to stop their bullying tactics. That will foster all sports rights, male or female.

    The SD Legislature, the Governor and the people of South Dakota are all in agreement that girls should compete against girls and women should compete against women at every level of sports. We differ only in the best way to accomplish this.

    1. Ed: How about the party leadership reject culture wars entirely and focus instead on how the Democrats are using the tail-end of the pandemic so incredibly well? $2T in handouts in the first 100 days and another $3T being tee’d up for “infrastructure” development. The relief package bailed out government employee unions pensions and the infrastructure bill is an enormous bribe to the trade unions. In 100 days Biden has put back in place the Democratic union machine the won elections from Kennedy until Reagan.

      The culture fights are the left waving its red cape of distraction in the face of a Trump-intoxicated conservative base while they consolidate power. We have to focus on issues that win general elections, not who can best woo the base to win a primary.

  12. MHS: Exactly. We are falling victim to the “shiny spoon effect” used by street thieves where we turn our eyes to the shiny spoon while the other hand is picking our pockets.

    1. We have to get beyond emotion and attack the real structural issues the Left is exploiting. Graham’s op-ed in today’s Journal on how they’ve twisted census data to create a false income inequality narrative is one stunning example. They are winning the pocketbook war while we’re fighting bathroom skirmishes.

  14. If she didnt like it VETO it…but it is an abuse of power to claim it is style and form changes….

    I want to meet these unnamed lawyers and constiitutional scholars that said this was style and form.

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