How is the petition right used today?

0:05The legislative petition has really declined. Let me just first say it happened in terms of the numbers that we begin to see. It happened roughly around the time of the World War I. It coincided with a number of things. First, the rise of surveys, where petitions for members of Congress and state legislatures used to be an indicator of public opinion. But once people started running surveys, you had a substitute for that. A lot of people now turn with their grievances to the legal system, so we can sue any number of private or public parties. The other thing that began to happen is, I think party mechanisms began to take over, whether it was the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and politics became, especially for these petitioning matters much more majoritarian. Most legislatures, like Congress and these state legislatures

1:02considered it to be just inefficient to spend all this time on petitioning. The very debate that you saw in the very early Republic, when people said, well this is inefficient, but we're doing it because it's just. Basically in the 1900s, legislatures in the states and at the national level began to decide differently. There were two important reforms in mid century, the Legislative Reorganization Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act that basically for Congress, shut down for the most part, the legislative petition process and converted most citizen complaints into complaints about proposed rules. It's not a substitute, but essentially one avenue of complaint about proposed policies today is through the notice and comment process that governs federal rule making.

1:56It is open to everybody, and there is supposed to be a response by the agency, although it's not quite the response that we would have expected over the long term of petitioning. But it's true that in that sense, legislative petitioning has really declined. I try to tell this to my students, when they sign a petition online, say, a liberal or conservative website or just any website, that petition may not be going anywhere. It may be just be going out into the Ether. Unlike the petitions that we're talking about today, there's no obligation or even norm of a government response to that petition. The other petition you tend to see a lot now is what I would call pubsitary petitions. That's a petition whose job it is or whose aim it is to place a candidate or proposition on a ballot.

2:47We see lots of those, and they're important. But again, with those petitions, once you hit a numerical threshold, there's no reason to gather any more signatures. If you don't hit the numerical threshold, it's as if the petition is voiceless. There's no obligation if you only get five signatures or anybody to respond. Again, it's not anything like the petition and response mechanism that we used to have.