It’s a political squeeze play with the Supreme Court at the center. As Democrats eye a potential Senate majority, a new demand is surfacing from the left: prove your loyalty to packing the Court, or don’t expect progressive support. That’s the argument made by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Mann, who, in a recent podcast interview, called for a “litmus test” for all Democratic Senate candidates on the question of expanding the Supreme Court.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, writing in American Thinker, flagged Mann’s comments as the latest sign of a broader push to transform the Court into a partisan institution. Turley, a frequent critic of the left’s institutional overhauls, described the proposed test as a “hostile takeover” of the judiciary, one that would remove a key constitutional barrier to a sweeping progressive agenda.
“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,” Mann said in the interview with Peter Dominick, according to Turley’s account. “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.”
Mann, who serves as Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action at Penn and is best known for the controversial “hockey stick” climate curve, has been pressing candidates to commit to major environmental reforms. But his pivot to court-packing as a precondition for support has drawn attention to the growing linkage between climate activism and judiciary restructuring.
The strategic logic behind expanding the Court
Turley argues that the push is not merely about the Court itself but about clearing the way for a radical legislative agenda. He points to Harvard professor Michael Klarman, who years ago laid out a plan to change election rules to ensure Republicans “will never win another election.” Klarman reportedly warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described,” making court-packing a necessary precondition for such changes.
According to Turley, that agenda includes measures ranging from wealth taxes to reparations to aggressive climate regulations. He characterizes these positions as aligned with the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which he asserts many Democrats are trying to distance themselves from even as they rely on DSA-aligned support to win Senate races.
Mann’s call has put some Democrats in an awkward spot. On one hand, they need progressive backing to secure key Senate seats. On the other, openly endorsing court-packing could alienate moderate voters. Turley suggests some Democrats are “picking and choosing a few DSA policies they think they can rhetorically support” even as they “do support them all, except maybe abolishing the Senate.”
Mann’s own legal troubles cast a shadow
The debate comes amid Mann’s own legal setbacks. Turley’s column recounts a defamation case that went badly for the climate scientist. Mann had sued critics over remarks about his work, but an appeals court reversed a jury verdict in his favor and sanctioned him for what it called “bad-faith trial misconduct.”
The court found that Mann’s legal team had allegedly presented false accounts of his losses, including a claim that a grant worth $9.7 million had been lost due to the defamatory remarks when it was later shown to be worth $112,000. The court ordered Mann to pay $1.1 million of his critics’ legal expenses, describing the misrepresentations as “an affront to the Court’s authority.”
Turley notes that Mann has not let the reversal and the financial penalty “dent his capacious ego,” and he continues to press for a court-packing litmus test as a condition for Democratic support.
A chorus of voices pushing expansion
Mann is hardly alone in calling for Supreme Court expansion. Turley names former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and former Attorney General Eric Holder as figures who have endorsed the idea. The common thread, Turley argues, is a desire to eliminate constitutional constraints on far-left policy goals by converting the Court into an institution packed with partisan appointees.
Turley rejects the argument that court-packing is necessary to make the Court reflect public opinion. The Court, he writes, was established precisely to protect the Constitution and uphold the rule of law, with justices appointed for life so they can ignore shifting public sentiment. Turning it into a partisan battleground, he concludes, would reduce it to “just another partisan institution in an age of rage.”
For Democrats weighing their path to a Senate majority, the question is whether embracing a court-packing litmus test helps or hurts. The demand, as articulated by Mann, is blunt: promise to expand the Court or lose progressive support. Whether that calculus wins elections or spooks swing voters remains an open question, but the debate is no longer theoretical.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-democrat-dsa-court-packing-litmus-test/