I’ve admired Mike DeWine, the newly re-elected governor of Ohio, ever since I, as a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, first saw him in action when he became a U.S. senator and Judiciary Committee member in 1995. Governor DeWine now has a historic opportunity to build a state supreme court dedicated to the interpretive principles of originalism and textualism that he espouses. Let’s hope that he avails himself of this critical opportunity.

On the same night that DeWine won re-election by a margin of 25 points, strong judicial-conservative candidates won all three races for new six-year terms on the Ohio supreme court. The current chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, faces mandatory retirement at the end of the year, and the remaining three justices are liberals.

Sitting associate justice Sharon L. Kennedy has been elected chief justice to succeed O’Connor. DeWine therefore has the responsibility to appoint someone to fill the remaining four years of Kennedy’s term as associate justice. That appointment will determine whether the court has a working majority of judicial conservatives.

The supreme court is poised to rule on some huge issues, including the claim that the Ohio heartbeat law signed by DeWine in 2019 violates an imagined state constitutional right to abortion.

This is no time for DeWine to settle for a justice who isn’t stellar.

One outstanding candidate I’m aware of is Ohio solicitor general Benjamin Flowers, who for more than three years has been successfully defending Ohio’s laws in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (a big pro-life victory), and the Ohio supreme court. Flowers was a law clerk to Justice Scalia and, in addition to graduating with high honors from the University of Chicago law school, has the special Ohio distinction of having received his undergraduate degree (summa cum laude, no less) from Ohio State.