There are plenty of ways to end up in the doghouse with voters, but Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb (R) certainly found the fastest: vetoing a bill on girls’ sports. Two weeks into the blowback, the governor is still trying to dig out of the hole he created for himself. But based on the latest polling, he’s going to need a lot bigger shovel.

Fewer than one in five Indiana voters approve of Holcomb now, a dramatic turn that shows just how significant the transgender issue has become. In Indiana, where the bill had 65 percent support (54 percent of which was categorized as “strong”), most people couldn’t believe that the governor would stake out such a wildly unpopular position. And yet, Holcomb decided to follow the likes of South Dakota’s Kristi Noem (R), who incurred the wrath of the entire Republican Party last year when she caved on a similar bill at the last minute — betraying voters and stunning everyone who assumed she was made of stronger stuff.

Since then, the outrage over Noem has served as a powerful warning to conservative leaders, who’ve raced to sign sports bills into law in more than a dozen states. Holcomb, meanwhile, has tried to rationalize his veto, arguing that the bill was “addressing something that isn’t a problem” — an absurd take that swimmers everywhere would happily rebut. In his own state, 77 percent know about the controversy caused by biological male Lia Thomas, and 75 percent of Hoosiers take the women’s side. “These are just excuses on [Holcomb’s] part,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) argued. “Hoosiers aren’t buying it.”

Just last month, women asked the NCAA, “Do we have a voice?” A collection of Olympians and other female swimmers wrote to the association complaining that America is “witnessing irrevocable damage to a sport” in a year that women should be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX. “It took a male-to-female transgender person one year to take the women’s swimming national championship title,” they argued. “This is not equality. Women’s standings, titles, records, and scholarships are suddenly at risk again” — when, like Holcomb, the NCAA could have done something to stop the bleeding.

Fortunately, in places like Alabama, there are leaders courageous enough — not only to protect sports, but to protect all children from making terrible, life-altering mistakes. Despite the Left’s harassment, Governor Kay Ivey (R-Ala.) just made Alabama one of the handful of trailblazing states to put the brakes on gender treatments for kids under 18. For FRC, who worked with state legislators for years to see this bill advance, last Friday’s signing was a moment of profound celebration. “We should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life,” Ivey said. “Instead, let us all focus on helping them properly develop into the adults God intended them to be.”

Alabama becomes the fourth state to protect children in some capacity from the sterilizing and mutilating treatments of the Left. Treatments, Americans learned last week, that the Biden administration is openly demanding that taxpayers fund. When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reiterated that, calling Alabama’s law “extreme,” state leaders fired back: “[We’re] tired of the Biden administration’s radical Leftist agenda and overreach into our state affairs. Our message to the Biden administration is to respect the 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution, and keep your nose out of our business.”

Deep down, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said on “Washington Watch,” Democrats know that 90 percent of the country doesn’t agree with their extremism. The idea that “there’d even be any disagreement about the abusive, inexcusable, egregious… mutilation of [young children’s] bodies” is astonishing, he shook his head. “It’s obviously child abuse.” At the end of the day, Good insisted, it’s up to us to “speak truth that God created two genders, and He makes no mistakes… The worst thing we can do is to reinforce the confusion or, worse, deceive parents about it.”

Originally published here.

Biden Fails in the Blanks on Key Issues

In the mad dash to turn things around before “a tornado hits Democrats” this November, the president has tried a lot of things. He’s spent more, mandated more, and floated wild ideas like stacking the Supreme Court and federalizing elections. He’s turned to his green lobby, his rainbow lobby, his deep blue progressive base lobby. But none of Joe Biden’s “solutions” have actually bothered to address our real problems. The disaster he’s made of the economy, southern border, foreign policy, U.S. energy production, and education are like fires raging out of control. And yet — even now — seven months away from a political reckoning for his party, there’s not a single sign that Biden is ready to pivot.

The White House’s latest idea for fighting Biden’s basement-level approval ratings is leaning into another hard-Left priority: gun control. While crime soars in major cities, the DOJ is announcing a new rule that classifies certain gun-making kits as “firearms,” an effort — they say — to crack down on the number of “ghost guns” flooding the streets. As NRO’s David Harsanyi has explained, “ghost gun” is a “scary-sounding” term for firearms that are “made by hobbyists” who buy their guns about 80-percent assembled and finish the project themselves. In typical Democrat fashion, the Left is going after these homemade guns, claiming that they’re behind this latest wave of shootings and homicides.

Harsanyi says that’s ridiculous. “Over the past few years, there have been numerous pieces written about the rise of ‘ghost guns.’ In most of them, unskeptical journalists allow law-enforcement officials to make rather improbable claims. The ambiguity of the phrase ‘ghost gun’… allows gun-control advocates to conflate homemade guns with firearms that have had their serial numbers removed (which is illegal).” In reality, he explains, “There are very few incidents in the past decade I could find involving homemade weapons… Criminals have a far easier time obtaining a gun without any serial number than buying expensive parts and building one.”

As usual, this is about Biden “doing something,” Harsanyi points out, “which usually means inhibiting law-abiding gun owners, and doing nothing about the underlying problem.” It’s just another example of this White House claiming to tackle an issue when, in actuality, they’re just pandering to their radical base. If the president wants to address the crime wave that’s gripping most Democratically-run cities, then how about re-funding the police? Closing the border? Enforcing existing laws? A ban on homemade guns might excite the president’s anti-gun donors, but it won’t do a thing to stop the violent crime that’s a direct result of the Left’s morally bankrupt policies.

The White House is swinging from branch to branch, desperate to land on something that will change the narrative — which, right now, has never been more damaging. Even CBS is sounding the alarm on Biden’s sinking ship, pointing to America’s sky-high dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of inflation (69 percent disapprove, 31 percent approve), crime (61 percent disapprove, 39 percent approve), and immigration (62 percent disapprove, 38 percent approve). Overall, his approval rating is the worst CBS News has ever registered at 42 percent — down 20 points from just one year ago.

Making matters worse, some members of the media concede, the president is losing the culture wars. His constant drumbeat on LGBT issues is so outside the mainstream that it’s becoming a political liability, a panel on “Meet the Press” agreed. In particular, they pointed to the Democrats’ over-the-top messaging on the Florida parental rights law. “If you were to ask the average parent of a first-grader, ‘Do you want your kid to be taught about sex in first grade?’ Most parents would probably say, ‘Ew, probably not,’” Josh Lederman told Chuck Todd. That’s where the Left’s aggressive messaging has become “a real problem for Democrats,” the panelists admitted. On things like gender and sexuality, Biden’s party has “consistently been — or at least perceived to be — on the wrong side of this issue.”

But, like Biden, the Democratic party is under the thumb of the hard Left. “You’d think that Democrats facing difficult races in 2022 and beyond would be doing everything they could to distance themselves from their party’s national image on social issues,” Nate Hochman mused. But “[e]ven in the face of a coming red wave, the party has continued to double down on the deeply unpopular Left-wing cultural ideology that has captured the imagination of its activist class.”

The president’s party has seven months left to meet voters in the middle. If they don’t, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warns, Republicans will push them there personally. “Let me put it this way,” the Kentucky senator said over the weekend. “Biden ran as a moderate. If I’m the majority leader in the Senate, and [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is the speaker of the House, we’ll make sure Joe Biden is a moderate.”

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.