The judicial branch is supposed to rely on facts and logical arguments. That is not how “America” writ large, however, is “supposed to work.” If that’s what the framers anticipated, they would have have had the other two branches likewise run by unelected subject matter experts with life tenure. But they didn’t.

The fact is that the world is too complicated to figure out via facts and logical analysis, and that’s why ultimate control of policy rests with elected politicians. We’re seeing this play out at a grand scale right now. In the US, classes are cancelled for the rest of the year. Meanwhile, German students went back to school a week ago. And in Sweden, lower schools were never even shut down in the first place. Logical analysis doesn’t tell you what are the appropriate trade offs between keeping the economy running and keeping people safe. What the purposes of the welfare state should be isn’t a fact waiting to be discovered through empirical methods. These are all political judgments. Even where facts and logical analysis could play a role, it often doesn’t, because experts don’t agree on often very simple facts, or the experts’ answers are too complicated to be actionable.