Sorry, KBJ: America is a democracy, never meant for rule by unelected experts

Amazing: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks “nonpartisan experts” should be controlling key parts of the federal government while the president and other “people who don’t know anything” sit on the sidelines letting “Ph.D.s” make the important decisions.

She made these shockingly elitist remarks during Monday’s oral arguments in a case about the president’s authority to fire officers of “independent agencies” such as the Federal Trade Commission.

The framers of the Constitution gave the president control over the Executive Branch, charged to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and to “appoint the agents charged with the duty of such enforcement” — as part of a system of checks and balances involving the Legislative and Judicial branches to prevent him (or her) from ruling as a dictator.

But progressives going back to Woodrow Wilson have despised checks and balances because they prevent the government from messing in people’s lives (“for the good of the American people,” as Jackson put it) the way credentialed elites believe it should.

And so they’ve end-run the Founders’ plan over the decades by establishing independent agencies to exercise executive power without anyone’s interference to manage complex policies on trade, communications, labor relations and much more.

And this explosion of alphabet-soup agencies birthed a Fourth Branch of government — the “administrative state,” an unelected, unaccountable and unconstitutional regime of “experts.”

What stops them from becoming dictatorial?

Pure professionalism insulates these experts from petty political concerns, liberal stalwarts like Justice Jackson insist: They’re “nonpartisan,” and shouldn’t have to worry about democratic opinion.

But democracy isn’t supposed to be “nonpartisan,” nor does slapping that label on anyone render them immune to disastrous groupthink or a host of other potential biases.

Key decisions about the direction of the country are supposed to reflect the will of the people; that’s why we have elections.

Jackson has faith in “all the scientists and the doctors and the economists” she thinks ought to run things.

We can’t help but recall the COVID pandemic, when the experts demanded we all “follow the science” and shut our mouths about the origin of the virus, school closures, social distancing and vaccine mandates.

But the experts turned out to be wrong — not in every case, but enough to expose the folly of giving unelected authorities our unconditional trust.

There’s no such thing as apolitical expertise; some agenda is usually at work, even if the experts aren’t clear-eyed enough to see it or admit it.

America was designed to be run democratically, not by a de facto priestly caste whose credentials happen to be academic rather than religious.