This week, Judge Mark Cohen’s long, checkered judicial career came to an ignoble end. The Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari to challenge the 2024 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he was properly suspended over a litany of partisan social media posts while a sitting judge.
Cohen is a former Democratic politician who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, but served for many years in the state House until defeated in 2016.
In 2018, Cohen successfully ran for the Court of Common Pleas. After receiving a “Not Recommended” rating from the Philadelphia Bar Association, he barely won the seat with the second-lowest vote total among the victors.
During this time on the bench, Cohen continued to maintain his political public persona with social media posts that many found injudicious and unethical. In October 2024, the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline took the rare step of ejecting him from the bench and suspending him without pay over his Facebook posts.
These posts included attacks on Republican policies and praise for Democrats such as Joe Biden, Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman. He also spoke out in favor of a variety of Democratic policies and union positions as well as commenting on issues ranging from abortion to gun control.
In one posting on September 22, 2022, Judge Cohen supported Philadelphia District Attorney Krasner, who has since been referred by a judge to the U.S. Attorney for possible criminal conduct:
“Philly DA Krasner, in a switch of tactics, now demands to testify before P[A] House Committee seeking evidence of wrongdoing to begin impeachment proceedings. Good move!” . . .
The irony for critics is obvious, since they have criticized Cohen as a Krasneresque judge who failed to observe proper lines of conduct.
On November 18, 2021, Judge Cohen attacked the Speaker of the House of Representatives: “Good night, Kevin McCarthy. Good night moon. No matter how long Kevin talks, we’ll have House passage of Build Back Better soon.”
His superiors on the Court warned him that such postings violated judicial standards, but Cohen continued to post under the name he was formerly referred to by his fellow judges.
After being suspended in 2024, the suspension was upheld this year by the highest court in the Commonwealth. In his concurrence, Justice David Wecht wrote:
“In an age of ubiquitous social media and heightened acrimony, it is imperative that jurists remain mindful and careful. They must avoid the type of partisan punditry and running online commentary on politics that poured forth continually from the keyboard of the judge involved in today’s case. People are free to do this sort of thing, but judges are people with an asterisk. A person who chooses to become a judge must park some portion of his or her First Amendment rights at the courthouse curb for the duration in which that judge is serving on the bench.”
In his U.S. Supreme Court challenge, Cohen argued that the lower courts erred in failing to apply a strict scrutiny test to his speech as opposed to the balancing test under Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968). We have previously discussed the use of Pickering in the limitation of speech of public employees.
Under Pickering, when a judge “speaks on a matter of public concern, then the court must balance the Commonwealth’s interest in preserving the efficient administration of justice against the judge’s interest in making the statement.”
In my book, The Indispensable Right, I discuss how judges in the early Republic were much like Cohen, openly partisan and using their office to herald the accomplishments of one party while denouncing the other. One of the most significant factors in creating our modern judiciary was adopting judicial ethics rules against such partisan statements and conduct. For critics, Judge Cohen appears to have waged a one-judge war to reinstate the “good old days” of partisan jurists.
This bold, arrogant, unethical, beyond reproach, in-your-face behavior is the standard operating approach for the Left. More often than not, main stream media covers for these losers, who mistake education for intelligence.
Ivan Pavlov is Estovir lecturing on ethics under a fake name.
Darren Smith – BAN FOR LIFE!
#. Personally the history of ethics governing judges is unfamiliar to me. I’d have to ask what the founders thought. Application of existing law is required without bias and when judgement is necessary reason prevails. The backdrop for this case is PA.
Not researching it…
Ask the Founders you say?
“…courts…must…declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
“…men…do…what their powers do not authorize, [and] what [their powers] forbid.”
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“[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing … To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
– Alexander Hamilton
The singular American failure is the judicial branch, with emphasis on the Supreme Court.
The absolute enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8, and the absolute 5th Amendment right to private property deny all aspects and facets of the communist America welfare state.
Congress has NO power to regulate anything other than “commerce among nations, states, and Indian tribes,” “the value of money,” and “land and naval Forces.”
To: X
How The Con Game works
X, Sam is Estovir. He’s also the Anonymous in your argument. Estovir then appears as himself.
Your exchange illustrates how Estovir uses puppets in an attempt to win debates. By switching identities, he can stay on the attack without having to rebut any of your points.
Notice how Sam melts away halfway through the exchange? Sam is seemingly gone at that point then you’re presumably debating an anonymous until Estovir comes in with his own name. It’s just a con game Estovir has been working for years. He wants to run you ragged answering his puppets.
I am a bit confused. I get the balancing test and I get you do not want partisan judges. Is this more about appearance of impropriety as compared to absolute impropriety?
Quiet Man – It’s important for judges to maintain impartiality, in reality and appearance. Publishing a stream of partisan opinions on social media doesn’t give the public or litigants who appear before the judge confidence he will rule from a position of neutrality. Having a biased judge is considered a “structural defect” or foundational flaw in the process. If a judge is overly partisan in his public speech, that could affect lots of different cases that come before him, and it destroys public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary.
#WeAreEstovir
I have a dim memory of the effort needed to remove a Court of Common Pleas judge who was not only obviously senile but quite vindictive. Still, it’s refreshing to see there’s still at least some recollection of proper judicial behavior.
Judicial ethics rules leave out one that is most dire: Judges should be completely indifferent to politics and none should hold membership in any political party.
Fair enough, but then no judges should be elected either.