“I do not recommend that you wear a mask,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email on February 5, 2020. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci declared on March 8, 2020. That same Anthony Fauci led the flip-flop on masks once the politicos in DC needed to be seen “doing something” about the coronavirus pandemic. Now that he’s tasted power, he’s loathe to let it go.

Griping about U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s recent ruling striking down Joe Biden’s mask mandate on public transit, Dr. “I Am the Science” Fauci argued that judges can’t make such challenges to The Science™.

“The principle of a court overruling a public health judgment by a qualified organization like the CDC is disturbing in the precedent that it might send,” Fauci complained on CBS. Things such as the mask mandate “really are the purview of the CDC,” he added on some backwater streaming service called CNN+. “We are concerned … about courts getting involved in things that are unequivocally [a] public health decision. I mean, this is a CDC issue. It should not have been a court issue.”

As the nation’s highest-paid bureaucrat, Fauci should know better.

Imperial decrees from unelected bureaucrats are not the ultimate and final word in our constitutional republic. Yet he is knowingly arguing exactly the opposite. He’s arguing that the CDC and “public health experts” should operate entirely outside the law.

Then again, this is the guy who once said of masks, “I don’t look at this as a liberty thing.”

And it has nothing to do with science, either. No state still has a mask mandate. Joe Biden gave his State of the Union to a largely maskless Congress. Yet for some reason, Biden and his know-it-all army of bureaucrats insist that masks on airplanes are the only thing saving us from another descent into viral spread.

Baloney.

Mizelle’s well-reasoned decision was made entirely based on the law. She said nothing of the merits of the science one way or the other, only that the CDC had exceeded its authority and not followed legal procedure to boot. Fauci ignores this.

The Biden administration can’t just accept Mizelle’s ruling and is therefore appealing the ruling — not because enforcing the mandate through May 3 as intended is going to stop a single case of COVID, but because protecting its future exercise of power is paramount. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said as much: “For current and future public health crises, we want to preserve that authority for the CDC.” But here’s the rub: Mizelle ruled that there was no “preserving” involved because the CDC never had this authority in the first place.

Whereas Fauci attacked Mizelle for not being a scientist, other leftists have attacked her for being only 35 (i.e., old enough to meet the constitutional threshold for being president), or for not having what they deem as sufficient bench experience to make such rulings.

This all obscures what to us seems glaringly obvious: Leftists have a major problem with women (or minorities) in authority thinking for themselves and coming to conservative conclusions. Diversity is great as long as there’s no deviation from leftist dogma.

Critically, what Mizelle did was stand for the Rule of Law. The power of government is derived from the consent of the governed. Our Republic and public officials both elected and unelected are bound by the U.S. Constitution. Bureaucrats like Fauci don’t get to declare themselves science itself and then insist that their decisions are final and immune from checks and balances.