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.”
It shows how far my Alma mater and the law schools gave fallen that they continue to hire a professor to teach law students who has been sanctioned by a court for unethical conduct. I do not see how tenure can protect him against behavior that shows he should not be teaching future lawyers. Penn should fire him.
Oldman you are right on the money. If all the assets of the wealthy people in America were seized, you’d have nothing but poor people left.
Pocahontas thinks “widely held public opinion.” is the law of the land. What a dopey injun.
Is Darren going to allow kirk, anon-estovir et al. to totally destroy this blog?
Darren is Estovir.
Get a life MORON ANON
ANON is destroying this blog OBVIOUS
The Democrats want to turn the US into a globalist puppet state, like the EU, Canada and Ukraine.
Michael Mann is the creator of the famous “hockey stick” climate model showing a rapid increase in temperatures at some point in the future. He was called a fraud by a Canadian climatologist, Tim Ball. Mann sued Ball. But in the suit Ball asked Mann to provide the data he used in creating the “hockey stick.” Mann refused to do so and was sanctioned by the Canadian judge. https://aier.org/research/hockey-stick-climate-change-enforcer-checked-hard-in-canadian-case/
After his delaying tactics lasting almost 8 years, the judge dismissed Mann’s libel case. https://www.climatecasechart.com/document/michael-mann-v-timothy-tim-ball-the-frontier-centre-for-public-policy-inc-and-john-doe_f1ee
To the people who want to create public frenzy, Mann is a hero.
ESTOVIR, who’s child is that in Edward’s thumbnail photo? She looks Asian, but Mahl sounds almost German. Or shouldn’t they correspond? Maybe not. Maybe Edward Mahl married an Asian who already had this little girl. And Edward is so fond of that child he displays her in a thumbnail on Johnathan Turley’s blog.
^ Creeper ^
Anonymous the Troll – She is half Asian and indeed I am quite fond of her.
But Edward, you’re really Estovir.
NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS MORON ANON!!! WHAT A DF!!
Tell me again the modern left is not a regime. These people are insane. If you still, ‘vote blue no matter who’, you are just stupid.
Estovir is James above and Edward Mahl below.
ANON=PSYCHO MORON
How to explain the sudden fanaticism of the Left of the Democratic Party? Let me suggest there is a shadow overhanging current politics: it is the national debt of more than 40 trillion dollars, which is already clouding the futures of our descendants, and which is greatly accelerating. https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-40-trillion-hole/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Roundup . . ..
No one wants to talk about this looming fiscal catastrophe because no one can suggest a politically acceptable remedy. But privately partly leaders do think about the problem. Of course, “progressives” want to increase federal spending and thus federal debt. They cannot hope to find the money to pay for the current, let alone the anticipated, spending except by creating a “wealth” tax that allows them to confiscate the property of the entire country. Republicans know that such a tax would be the practical end of the country, but they lack the courage to propose limits to increases in spending and limitations of further spending, Thus, as a distraction, it is necessary to shout, scream, threaten, and generally create an atmosphere of hysteria in which no will notice that we are like the passengers on the Titanic heading for the iceberg. Our descendants will rue our political cowardice.
Edward –
They cannot hope to find the money to pay for the current, let alone the anticipated, spending except by creating a “wealth” tax that allows them to confiscate the property of the entire country.
If such wealth were confiscated, it would almost certainly not be used to pay down the debt. Even in a best case scenario where every penny of the top 100 billionaires in America was used to pay down the debt, it would pay down $3.8 trillion, or less than 10% of the debt. A new $3.8 trillion would then be added to the debt in two years.
America will have no choice but to renounce its debt. It does that already, little by little, through inflation. Once the cost of living doubles, which only takes a couple decades, 50% of the debt has been renounced. But that tactic has its limits. Pretty soon 100% of federal spending will be on entitlements and interest on the national debt. No money left for anything else, including the military.
Thus, as a distraction, it is necessary to shout, scream, threaten, and generally create an atmosphere of hysteria in which no will notice that we are like the passengers on the Titanic heading for the iceberg.
Hence the need for more incidents like Tonya Harding, O.J. Simpson, or whales stuck in ice in Alaska, to create a media frenzy and distract us. If those happen, it might not be crazy to suggest they’re created by the government 😉