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 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.”
It’s the birth of new cultural pejorative, keep your eye on that.
Mann’s case against Steyn rested on lies (immoral) which the judge used to impose punitive (moral) damages,
against the innocent (immoral). Don’t wonder if the judge took a cut of that $1Million from Mann.
Falsely accusing an enemy of immoral conduct sounds weak and pathetic as a war tactic,
but has been so successful for marx in silencing opposition that it appears as a lack of moral fiber
among the innocent, who often relent & refuse to defend themselves and others.
This is a compounding victory for the Left whose march through the institutions includes your conscience, your soul.
Essentially marx is corrupt church police, falsely accusing innocent people as a threat to convert.
Sorry. But Johnathan Turley is missing Mann’s primary reason for packing the High Court with leftist eco-activists …
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 (Massachusetts v. EPA) that greenhouse gases are considered air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, which required the EPA to determine if these emissions endanger public health or welfare. This ruling led to the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, establishing the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump’s EPA rescinded the endangerment finding
The EPA Endangerment Finding is a determination made by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and welfare, which legally required the agency to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act. However, on February 12, 2026, the EPA rescinded this finding, removing the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases from vehicles and other sources.
Yet … to my knowledge … no case has been brought to the SCOTUS that would rule on the reversal of the endangerment finding. Mann wants a hardcore anti-fossil fuel ideologue High Court to forever certify the DEATH of fossil fuels.
But wait! I thought Trump was tearing down our ‘Institutions’? Now those ‘Institutions’ are baaaad MmmmKayy?
I can’t keep up with the Neo Bolsheviks
“any Democrat who believes in our institutions and resists this mob will be a persona non grata in the party as an “institutionalist”
So many syllables so clever, eh? To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: -A nazi is a nazi is a nazi is a nazi. –
Wake me when the music stops.
Mann is a typical liberal pos. When the legal processes and system don’t work to his benefit then there must be something wrong with the system and it must be changed. This clown has been lying for decades.