The vote in Whole Woman’s Health was 5 to 3. Justice Antonin Scalia had died several months earlier; had he been on the court, or had his successor, Neil Gorsuch, been seated in time, the vote would surely have been 5 to 4. Justice Anthony Kennedy voted with the majority. Now, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sits in Justice Kennedy’s all-important seat.

During last week’s argument in June Medical Services v. Russo, Louisiana’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Murrill, argued that her state was “demonstrably different” from Texas in both its need for additional regulation and the opportunity its hospitals offer for receiving admitting privileges — if only doctors would try harder.

The facts, as laid out by a federal district judge, John deGravelles, after a six-day trial, are completely different however. At the time he ruled in 2017, only four patients of the Shreveport-based Hope Clinic, which brought the case on behalf of its doctors and patients, had needed hospitalization during the 23 years the clinic had been providing some 3,000 abortions a year. The judge wrote that one doctor’s effort to get admitting privileges “reads like a chapter in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ ” He said, moreover, that if the law takes effect, there will be one or at most two doctors performing abortions in Louisiana. (In overturning the District Court decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit substituted its own factual findings for those of Judge deGravelles, a remarkably aggressive move for an appellate court ordinarily bound to accept the trial court’s findings of fact unless they are “clearly erroneous.”)

A Supreme Court decision that buys the state’s argument, that treats its 2016 decision as anything other than completely binding on Louisiana, will be nothing but a smoke screen. A cynic might call it an election-year ploy designed to make an indefensible outcome look moderate. It doesn’t take a cynic to understand that there is no middle ground here.

Back in 2016, that was immediately clear to Alabama’s attorney general, Luther Strange, a Republican, who was in the midst of appealing a ruling by a federal district judge, Myron Thompson, that the state’s admitting privileges law was unconstitutional. Recognizing that the Supreme Court’s ruling necessarily applied to his state’s law as well, Mr. Strange announced, “Accordingly, my office will dismiss our appeal of a 2014 federal court ruling declaring Alabama’s abortion clinic law unconstitutional.”

Nearly four years later, that action by a Deep South attorney general appears even more remarkable than it did at the time: an elected politician acted like a lawyer. My fear now is two-pronged: that the lawyers on the Supreme Court will behave like politicians and that too many of us will be too snowed by their seeming moderation to call them out on it.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.