University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Mann is the Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and has pushed candidates to commit to major environmental reforms. Notably, he seemed to pivot in an interview with Peter Dominick on a podcast last week, calling for all Democratic candidates to face a litmus test on committing to pack the Supreme Court: promise to pack or get the sack. It is only the latest example of how the hostile takeover of the Court is now the priority for many Democrats in removing a barrier to a radical agenda.
Mann declared:
“When it comes to Senate races, there should be a litmus test,” Mann said. “It isn’t just good enough to be a Democrat. You’ve got to be a Democrat who would be willing to expand the Supreme Court…There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here. If you care about the environment, you’ve got to vote for the Democrats now.”
Establishment candidates are offering the mob the Supreme Court to show their bona fides as the far left turns on “institutionists” who support our constitutional system. As I previously wrote, even law professors and deans joined this movement in calling for the rejection of our Constitution on the 250th anniversary of our Revolution.
Once packed, the Court could greenlight a variety of unconstitutional measures.
Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to make these changes possible.
That includes an agenda for extreme measures ranging from wealth taxes to reparations to climate control regulations.
Mann raised the need to reverse doctrines limiting agency authority—a barrier to some climate control measures. In so doing, he got the underlying law fundamentally wrong:
“It was in a conservative Supreme Court decision within the last few years that introduced the so-called Chevron standard. Basically, what they said was that the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.”
In 2024, the Supreme Court actually overturned the Chevron Doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. It also did not rule that “the EPA no longer had the authority to make rules based on the science and its own determination.” Rather, it said that courts would review such decisions without the prior presumptions in favor of agency decision-making. The restored, traditional judicial review is precisely to determine whether agency decisions are based on credible interpretations of the law and science.
Mann has had his own conflicts with the courts. He was sanctioned last year after winning a defamation case against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn for attacking his climate control research.
At the time, some of us questioned the award, which awarded just $1 in actual damages but $1 million in punitive damages. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case, BMW of North America v. Gore, striking down a punitive damages award. The case involved the company’s practice of repairing and repainting cars damaged in transit without telling the customers. The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the car’s lost value due to the lack of a factory paint job and other damage; it then imposed $4 million in punitive damages for the company’s dishonesty.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. reduced the award against Steyn to just $5000 after finding the original award to be “grossly excessive.”
The court later learned that Mann’s defense team had allegedly presented false accounts of his losses after the criticism. Mann’s legal team was accused of presenting a chart that listed a grant that Mann allegedly lost due to the defamatory remarks as $9.7 million when it was later found to be worth $112,000. Irving also found a disparity in the grant income figures given to the jury.
The court found the alleged misrepresentations to be “an affront to the Court’s authority” and sanctioned Mann and his legal team “for bad-faith trial misconduct.” After reversing the jury verdict, the court ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million of his critics’ legal expenses.
Now, Mann is calling for all Democratic candidates to pledge to pack the Supreme Court as a condition for running. So any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be a persona non grata in the party as an “institutionalist” captured by “nostalgia.”
Mann joins a growing list of figures demanding the hostile takeover of the Court from Kamala Harris to Pete Buttigieg. The priority is telling. Much of what is planned by the far-left will be difficult to accomplish due to constitutional limits. You can remove those limits by eliminating an independent Supreme Court and turning this essential institution into a federal version of state courts packed with partisan jurists.
At its base is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Court’s role. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” However, the court was meant to be counter-majoritarian to protect minority groups and viewpoints from the majority will.
Mann’s advice is different from that of James Carville, who wants Democrats to hide this intended move from the public (which continues to oppose court packing). Carville told Democratic candidates: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”
Mann and others (including former Attorney General Eric Holder) are done with any pretense: “There’s no way not to be partisan. There’s no way not to be political here.” In other words, it is time to make the Supreme Court itself partisan and political. It will then be reduced to just another partisan institution in an age of rage.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Michael Mann is a typical professor of vaunted authority who has decided he is unequivocally correct on matters outside his expertise. Academics of real standing rarely stray far from their own fields. Mann has instead taken up a cause driven by passion, much as climate change itself is a passion of his. His academic prestige almost certainly rests on the many grants awarded to him because of that passion (and the sucking up that went with it). He now wants to use that stature to influence decisions in an area about which he knows little.
This pattern is somewhat reminiscent of Anthony Fauci, who used his power to obtain letters from prominent figures supporting a wet-market origin of COVID-19 in exchange for grant renewals.
Gdonaldallen above and Alank below are both Estovir.
They are totalitarian thugs. One day, “there will be blood.” Interesting is the fact that many of the so-called legal scholars advocating for a totalitarian political system are progressive Jews: those of the same ilk who defended Stalin up to the minute they were executed in Lubyanka. Amazing the idiocy of these people. I should know because lots of my relatives would side with the progressives
The University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater) is a useful example of “higher education” in America today. It hired Joe Biden as a professor. It built the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement with China money. Its president became Ambassador to Germany. And its subsequent president testified before Congress that mob Jew-hatred on its campus does not violate Penn’s Code of Student Conduct.
Packing the Supreme court to remove majoritarian protections is not only an idea to allow authoritarianism it is contrary to the US constitution and, as such, any elected person who subscribes to this should be denied their seat in congress. Such an official cannot honestly take an oath to “support and defend” the constitution so they should not be seated, period, full stop!
We cannot allow enemies of the constitution to do their will upon our blessed republic and the oath is meant to do this. We banned democrats who rebeled from office once they took up arms and supported the dissolution of the republic and this is even worse! They are traitors to the constitutional order and MUST be stopped.
I read Mann’s book, Dire Predictions. In my humble opinion, his message could be distilled down to “My models are always right, so do what I say.” I feel like I wasted my time and money. I got much more compelling arguments from Patrick Moore’s book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, and Steven Koonin’s book, Unsettled.
And it turns out, Moore and Koonin were right. The science is slowly moving toward a consensus that there is likely a human element to climate change, but that impact is still difficult to quantify, and the doomer scenarios are losing support among climate scientists. Even Bill Gates is backing off the doomer scenarios. Mann’s predictions were used by doomers to push radical climate-change policies.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mann is “pressuring” (that’s too kind a word for it) other academics into supporting court packing. Mann is also litigious and sues opposing commentators in D.C. courts (I wonder why he picked D.C.? ). Despite that, he owed over $1.1 million in legal fees to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Randy Simberg, and the National Review and was forced to negotiate a settlement. According to Copilot’s AI, “The courts have increasingly viewed the litigation as an attempt to silence dissent rather than a genuine legal defense.” True that.
I wonder if Mann will sue me just for posting what Copilot’s AI told me. I made a copy of it just in case my lawyer needs it.
“My models are always right, so do what I say.”
Well said.
Here’s how not right they are:
He alleges that “climate change is deadly,” especially fossil fuels.
Yet the fact is that climate-related property destruction and deaths dropped precipitously in the 20th century. (Just invert his idiotic hockey stick.)
It is hard to take seriously a “theory” that flies in the face of a century of reality.
Agree. Bjorn Lomborg does a much better job of pointing out the puts and takes than Mann does.
Mann was born in 1965, and brought up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. This was apparently his role model. His bio is clear that he lived and worked in an academic cocoon since grade school, moving from one degree to another across the decade following high school and being appointed a full-time faculty member upon completing that cycle. This lot will always view themselves as a protected class high on Olympus Mons, far from the madding crowd.
Litmus test eh?
What is next? Signed pledges, little red books, public pronouncements pledging allegiance to the party, swearing to pack the court in the name of . . . whatever?
Incredibly stupid comment. Learn to think.
California Senate Passes Bill To Fine Influencers Over Undisclosed Paid Political Posts
The California Senate passed a bill on Aug. 24 to fine content creators who make paid political content without disclosing the compensation.
The legislation, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Marc Berman, will still need a vote in the state Assembly before it reaches Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
By Savannah Hulsey Pointer – via The Epoch Times ~ Aug 26, 2026
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-senate-passes-bill-fine-influencers-over-undisclosed-paid-political-posts
I suspect the intent is to protect themselves against GOP influencers, but this door swings both ways.
I don’t think these radicals even understand the role of the Supreme Court. It is not to allow Plaintiffs a venue to obtain policies they desire. It is there to resolve conflicting interpretations of the law (including the Constitution) arising from cases originating at the District Courts, and conflicting theories decided in the Appellate Courts. It is NOT a law-making body — it is a law clarifying body.
Congress has the power to overturn legal precedent decided by the Supreme Court, through both statute and Constitutional Amendment. Two big examples are that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave US Citizenship rights to the former slaves overturning the Dred Scott case theory that these folks were property — and, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave US Citizenship to Native Americans (desiring it) in defiance of Elk v. Wilkins (1884) which held that Indians were to be excluded from US Nationality.
So, these leftist hacks want to turn the Court into something akin to the Public Safety Commission during the French Revolution, a place of instant law-making to satisfy mob sentiments. But it won’t work, because cases take years of “ripening” before reaching the Supreme Court, and when they get there, any opinion that looks crooked to enough Americans can later be overturned in Congress.
Except one reason why they want to stack SCOTUS with hacktivists is to provide amnesty to the tens of millions of invaders Biden purposely allowed in. The newly packed SCOTUS will then grant amnesty and voting rights to those tens of millions who will be loyal Democrat voters because Democrats confiscated money from American taxpayers and gave it to them.
Seems obvious to me.
Democrats can not replace themselves. Full stop.
That is because Democrat policies are anti-reproduction. They love killing their preborn children; they celebrate and promote homosexuality – (newsflash, it is impossible for homosexual sex to lead to reproduction); they stoke female hatred against males with their idiotic “toxic masculinity” rhetoric; and of course, they paint a picture of a dystopian climate future because humans use fossil fuel to make our lives more comfortable – and some of the fruitcakes who actually believe their lies choose not bring children into the world.
Again, it all seems obvious to me. We KNOW, with near certainty, what Democrats will do with power. The biggest threat is from the weak, pathetic RINOs who often cave to their emotional blackmail tactics.
“… In other words, it is time to make the Supreme Court itself partisan and political. It will then be reduced to just another partisan institution in an age of rage.” – JT
“And now you know… the rest of the story.” – Paul Harvey
There were academics in attendance at the Wannsee Conference. While none of the attendees were working university professors or career academics at the time, they were a highly educated group of bureaucrats and officers: eight of the 15 participants held academic doctorates. Historians often emphasize this statistic to highlight that the “Final Solution” was not engineered by uneducated extremists, but rather organized and consented to by highly educated, upper-class professionals and legal experts. These leopards never change their spots, do they.
A Penn State professor, teaching at not only the ‘Sanctuary City for Pa*edophiles’ but now also the ‘Mexican Cartel North’.
Power-hungry communists eager to destroy America and rebuild it in their own image.
Of course, Let’s do all the things that YOU want to do.
Winner ⬆️… 🏆🏆🏆
To quote Deputy Fife: “Nip it, Nip it in the bud!” “Nip it, Nip it, Nip it in the Bud”.
Yep, about the level of intellect we expect from Anonymous.
wiseoldlawyer,
You are correct.
We see annonys lower level elevator IQ comments all the time.
No wonder he is such a failure to launch.
So sez the fraud who can’t get it up.
Sorry looking COMMIE
Liberals who want to pack the court, remember since it may happen to you in the future.
Actually I would support lowering the scotus to 7 just to be the opposite. uno reverse.
Works for blockades and more!
NoBlogs.org : Connecting radical people. Non commercial, antifascist, antisexist, privacy-oriented blog platform.
Destroy MAGA now and forever.
Destroy MORON ANON!!! HA HA
come at me commie!
We apologize in advance that you will have to live in freedom with your life in your own pathetic hands.