Last week the US Supreme Court agreed that the Kentucky Attorney General has the right to defend that state’s law that prohibits surgical abortions. A pro-life governor signed the bill into law in twenty eighteen but then lost that same year to a pro-abortion governor. Abortion clinics challenged the law in the courts, and the new governor refused to defend it. The pro-life attorney general appealed to intervene but was denied in the lower federal courts. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said a state has a “weighty interest” in “protecting its own laws.”

While the court didn’t deal with the content of the law, a decision like this bodes well for upholding the rule of law. When a state passes a law, an elected official should be able to defend it. Now, if no elected official chooses to defend it, that’s a different matter. With our current governor and attorney general, this very situation could happen—because elections have real consequences.