South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s spokesman, Ian Fury, has unloaded on Ron DeSantis, criticizing the Florida governor’s commitment to the pro-life cause and questioning whether he “believe[s] that 14-week-old babies . . . have a right to live.”
While reporting for a piece about the transgender lobby’s outsized influence in South Dakota, I reached out to Fury to see if the governor’s office was interested in providing a statement. Fury responded with a lengthy statement rejecting “any implication that Governor Noem is overly cozy with” the major lobbying groups that helped kill a long line of anti-gender-ideology bills in the state. But in a follow-up email, he pivoted to an unprompted diatribe about the contrast between Noem’s and DeSantis’s records on the issue of abortion.
Fury argued that “Governor Noem was the only Governor in America on national television defending the Dobbs decision.” He then queried: “Where was Governor DeSantis? Hiding behind a 15-week ban. Does he believe that 14-week-old babies don’t have a right to live?” DeSantis, Fury continued, “just terminated his pro-life Secretary for AHCA, Simone Marstiller, the most pro-life member of his cabinet. Florida Right to Life is embarrassed by Gov. DeSantis’s record, so they invited Governor Noem to speak at their annual conference in October 2021.” He closed out the email by speculating as to whether National Review was “no longer pro-life . . . because that’s the message you send by carrying water for Gov. DeSantis.”
The attack comes amid discussion of both Noem and DeSantis as potential 2024 presidential contenders — although Noem’s name has become less prominent in those discussions over the course of the past year, following a series of high-profile missteps by the South Dakota governor. In March 2021, Noem placed second to DeSantis in the CPAC 2024 straw poll that did not include Trump. During her speech at the same event, Noem took a not-so-subtle shot at her Floridian counterpart: “We’ve got Republican governors across this country pretending they didn’t shut down their states—that they didn’t close their beaches, that they didn’t mandate masks, that they didn’t need to issue shelter-in-place [orders]. Now, I’m not picking fights with Republican governors. All I’m saying is that we need leaders with grit. That their first instinct is to make the right decision, that they don’t backtrack and then try to fool you into the fact that they never made the wrong decision.”
As I’ve written before, Noem’s claim to have been the staunchest anti-lockdown champion in the country is deceptive: The governor tried to lock down South Dakota but was blocked by conservatives in the state legislature — and then proceeded to take credit for it.
DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban last April. At a press conference in December, the governor was asked if he would sign a heartbeat bill if it passed the legislature in the upcoming session: “I’m willing to sign great [pro]-life legislation,” he responded. “That’s what I’ve always said I would do.”