It seems that progressives cannot decide if they want more democracy or less.  In the early 1900s they wanted more.  With the 1913 17th Amendment, they demanded and got popular election of US senators. Other democratic “reforms” included the recall, referendum and the initiative at the state level.

Now former Obama OMB director Peter Orszag is calling for less democracy.  In fact, he is calling for rule by experts as the Ohio Farmer makes clear here. In order to break the gridlock in Washington, he wants to set up panels of experts to make decisions that are then reviewable by Congress.  In other words, experts rule and Congress is given the chance to veto laws passed by the experts. This rule by experts is currently the law of the land because it is the way Obamacare attempts to control health care costs.

He [Orszag] wants the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the central reform mechanism of Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), to be the new template for governance generally.  Readers will recall that IPAB is, in Orszag’s words, “an independent panel of medical experts” whose recommendations on controlling health care costs become law unless Congress and the president explicitly countermand them.  According to Obamacare, Congress cannot dismantle IPAB, no matter how much the medical experts outrage mere citizens, except in the distant future and by following an elaborate procedure that has no authority in a Constitution that vests “all legislative powers” in the elected national legislature.

(By the way, the Goldwater Institute is the only organization to file a suit challenging the constitutionality of the IPAB.)

The Ohio Farmer opts for Madison’s Constitution not Orszag’s.

One reason to prefer Madison’s solution to the problem of making democracy work over Orszag’s is that it displays an astute sense that the abuse of power is an endemic political problem, one so old it’s often rendered in Juvenal’s Latin: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Who will guard the guardians themselves?  If Orszag gets his way we will be forced to ask, where will we find the experts who know how to protect us from the experts?