Why did the Founding generation think that we needed the Petition Clause?

0:04The petition clause of the First Amendment basically says that Congress cannot interfere, and I'm paraphrasing here with the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances. That's a very important statement there. I think here some degree of literalism is very important when we read that text. It does not say the right of the people to petition Congress for redress of grievances. It does not say the right of the people to petition the president or the courts or a federal agency.

0:39By the government, it means all aspects, all agents and agencies and organizations of the government, whether legislative, judicial, executive, administrative, or otherwise. That's important because there were a number of state constitutions being written around the same time where it was explicitly stated that in a state Constitution Bill of Rights, that it was the right of the people to petition the legislature. The framers of the First Amendment in the First Congress chose the government, and so it's very, very broad.

1:16The other thing I would just say about the petition clause is that it came in response to petitioning that was very common during the Revolution, very common during English and medieval European political history. It's always difficult to say, well, why did they put this particular clause in there. But I think the experience that English colonial subjects had with petitioning and the actual suppression of petitioning by the English crown in previous centuries.

1:51With this petition clause, I think it's fair to say that at minimum, it means that no restrictions can be placed on the kinds of petitions, so as many people can sign them as they wish, nor can any restriction be placed on the subject of these petitions. If you look at some of the most important protest acts or protest petitions that were sent by the Continental Congress, what is called the olive branch petition, which was a last chance to try to make up some degree of compromise between the colonists and the English crown, a number of those acts protested against petitions, the Stamp Act, the way the Stamp Act was enforced, things like that. At some level, the petitions that had been repeatedly sent by Colonial assemblies and by the United assemblies in the Continental Congress to protest these acts were basically met with not only rejection,

2:54but by deployment of troops and/or other officers of colonial governors to enforce the taxation. You see this right in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which is that the petitions of the people have just been repeatedly ignored in this sense. There was a very strong feeling on the part of the colonists before the Revolution, and then immediately after it, that the crown had not only ignored politicians, but had reacted violently to them.