When a United States district judge, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, overturned the Biden administration’s mask mandate, she reminded this White House of what we heard so often during President Trump’s years: No one is above the law.

In times of crisis, people seek a savior on a white horse — or, in the case of Covid, in white coats. Now, as the pandemic recedes, Americans are reasserting the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and the bureaucrats aren’t happy.

The chief medical advisor to the president, Anthony Fauci, and the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Ashish Jha, both criticized Judge Mizelle’s ruling as beyond the court’s domain, illustrating just how important it is to rein in their powers.

Both physicians cast themselves and their colleagues in the CDC as a sort of medical star chamber, immune from oversight, accountable to none of our republic’s checks and balances.

Dr. Jha responded to the ruling by saying, “Public health decisions like this should be made by public health scientists.” He may think so, but decisions about matters of law are made by judges, and mandating citizens behave a certain way was one of those.

Dr. Fauci told the defunct streaming service CNN+, “[W]e are concerned about … courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally a public health decision.” Note that this is the way the “right” to commit abortion is described.

Judges discovered that right in 1973’s Roe v. Wade ruling, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the administration these two doctors serve to say the high court shouldn’t have intervened in that matter of health. 

Dr. Fauci described the mask case as “a CDC issue that should not have been a court issue,” ignoring that each of the seven presidents he served were subject to judicial oversight.

The doctor added that he “was deeply disappointed to see a federal judge step in and take that decision away from public health scientists,” but the CDC is not a fourth branch of government superior to the others.

Under Article II, chief executives cannot infuse those they appoint with powers beyond the ones they possess, and the concept of unquestionable “experts” itself is antithetical to constitutional principles. 

As industrialist Henry Ford said, “We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an ‘expert’… .[N]o one ever considers himself ‘expert’ if he really knows his job.”

Throughout Republican administrations, the Democrats now governing Washington praised nationwide injunctions on cases such as the so-called Muslim ban, which had also been animated by a desire to protect citizens. 

What’s a mask for the goose is a mask for the gander.

Opponents of Judge Mizelle point out she was nominated by President Trump, as if this casts doubt over her ruling. How soon they have forgotten applauding Chief Justice Roberts, who scolded Mr. Trump in 2019 for a similar characterization.

Justice Roberts said, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Our leaders thought little of the law during the pandemic. When asked of his Covid restrictions, “By what authority did you nullify the Bill of Rights in issuing this order?” Phil Murphy, Democratic governor of New Jersey, had a telling response: “I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this,” he told Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson. Yet that’s exactly what we empower judges to think about: safeguarding our inalienable rights.

This is the beauty of our system. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David McCullough, explained after 9/11 that our nation sometimes tramples rights in times of war, but after the crisis passes, we always set about clawing back our liberties.

Congress passes bills and the president signs them. All citizens are subject to the resulting laws as applied by the men and women in black robes, even if it upsets bureaucrats in white coats.