Left-wing climate activists are trying to manipulate the justice system 

Courthouse bureaucrats are helping a left-wing dark money group exploit the judicial system to destroy American traditional energy companies. 

The Federal Judicial Center (FJC), the federal agency in charge of research and education for federal judges and judicial staff, has partnered with a leftist group called the Climate Judiciary Project, according to a new oversight report. I’m concerned that this collaboration means court staff are helping far-left climate activists lobby and direct judges behind closed doors. 

Green New Deal policies are deeply unpopular with the American public. Instead of advancing policies that will benefit Americans, the left is funding lawsuits and trainings to achieve them. Since 2017, left-wing groups have “donated” millions of dollars to law firms like Sher Edling, which has filed over 20 unprecedented lawsuits alleging that oil and gas companies are liable for weather-related damages because they knowingly caused climate change. 

Around the same time these lawsuits popped up, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonprofit climate advocacy organization, launched the Climate Judiciary Project to provide judges with “education on climate science, the impact of climate change, and the ways climate is arising in the law.” To date, the Climate Judiciary Project has “briefed” more than 2,000 state and federal judges on how to establish a body of law supporting “action” on climate change. As the report details, the organization’s funding comes from the same sources bankrolling the climate change lawsuits. Activist academics participating in the climate litigation prepared the Climate Judiciary Project’s “educational curriculum,” which is full of rigged, made-for-litigation studies. 

The taxpayer-funded FJC — whose stated mission is to “support the efficient, effective administration of justice and judicial independence” — is compromising its credibility and mission by helping these climate activists, who by all appearances are facilitating plaintiffs’ suits through ex parte communications with judges. That is the opposite of judicial independence.

From my post on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I watched many of my Democratic colleagues grill President Trump’s judicial nominees over participating in events hosted by certain non-profits. Unlike the Climate Judiciary Project, these nominees were transparent in disclosing their participation to the committee. The events they attended were also almost always public, unlike the Climate Judiciary Project’s private judges-only briefings.

Moreover, those events were forums to debate and discuss the law — not indoctrination sessions where activists sought to influence outcomes of specific cases. Imagine the hue and cry from these same colleagues if FJC was hosting events with a right-leaning organization. 

FJC must publicly renounce future collaborations with the Climate Judiciary Project and publicly share the content it has previously distributed at these events. FJC should also share what criteria, if any, it uses to assess the propriety of partnerships with third-party groups. Failure to do so represents an ongoing and substantial ethics issue for the FJC, and by extension, our courts.

Furthermore, governors, state lawmakers and state attorneys general should contact their state judicial administrative agencies to ensure they are not hosting or endorsing Climate Judiciary Project programming.  

The justices of the Supreme Court should also take note of the Climate Judiciary Project’s corrupt influence campaign. A certiorari petition in Sunoco v. City and County of Honolulu is currently pending before their court. The case is a potential landmark, asking whether suits of the kind Climate Judiciary Project champions can even proceed. The organization’s underhanded campaign reveals the essentially political nature of these climate cases and weighs in favor of the high court taking the case.  

Indeed, the counsel of record for the Honolulu case is Sher Edling. Not only does Sher Edling have the same left-wing funding sources as the Climate Judiciary Project, but it also relies on the same left-wing law professors. For instance, UCLA law professor Ann Carlson, the Biden-Harris administration’s failed nominee to head up the country’s highway safety agency, assisted Sher Edling on these climate change cases and helped to develop the Climate Judiciary Project’s curriculum.

Issues like these prompted House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and me to conduct a joint investigation into Sher Edling’s operations, which, as we will soon publicly detail, has revealed new information regarding its backers. 

The Climate Judiciary Project’s website anonymously quotes a judge who received one of its climate briefings. The judge said courts “have a legal need to be gatekeepers about good and bad science.” That’s absolutely true. But the Climate Judiciary Project’s partnership with the FJC betrays a different kind of gatekeeping function — one that privileges certain parties and causes over others. That is contrary to judicial independence and to the FJC’s mission. It must stop. 

Ted Cruz is Texas’s junior U.S. senator and its former solicitor general. He is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.