Another avenue for reaching the President is shut down "temorarily"

Great Debates
1

White House “temporarily” shuts down “We The People” petition site, after failing to follow their own rules and failing to officially follow up on 17 petitions that had each successfully gathered up the required 100,000 names within 30 days. The White House claims that the site will be back up in January, in a way that will say taxpayers more than a million dollars a year.

  1. I do not believe that it will come back in any form that will allow petitions a way to object to the President’s way of doing things.
  2. In what possible way could they have spent more than a million on this?
  3. In what possible way could they adjust the website to save over a million?

The article states that

If the White House keeps cutting off communication from those they don’t want to hear from, how will they know what and who to respond to?

2

Do you think they were paying any attention before?

3

Pretty sure this clip accurately describes the mindset at the Whitehouse…Roman Senate in History of the World, Part 1 (NSFW language).

4

I saw that article. Doesn’t seem like they were looking at it anyway. Shame.

Got a conservative Supreme Court judge though, so it all works out.

5

Instead of paying a staff of policy wonks to answer the questions, everyone gets an automated e-mail response that says “No”.

6

Would that be more expensive than having petitioners transferred to a page containing a GIF of a stickman dropping a stack of papers into the trash, or less?

7

There are plenty of other ways to put the bare minimum effort into a cause. Try yelling at the TV when Trump is talking.

8

I sense there is a lack of concern on your part when it comes to people of a political persuasion unlike your own not having equal(or any) means to communicate with their President.

9

What makes you think the current White House gives a damn about what anyone thinks outside their little bubble? Cutting off what they view as dissent is a feature, not a bug. I agree, I don’t expect that site to be back up in anything like it’s former form.

10

I’m not sure this was ever that great a venue for Americans to petition government. If you look at the wikipedia website about this, the average response time for petitions under Obama was 117 days. That’s the average. It sounds like one of those “good ideas on paper” things, but didn’t seem to work out all that well.

It doesn’t surprise me that Trump would would to quash this. It was brought online in Sept of 2011, so it’s not like it’s been around all that long anyway. No one is going to force Trump to answer questions he doesn’t want to answer. If you look at most of the petitions, they were kind of screwy, too. “The President should resign”. Yeah, that’s going to get a real serious answer.

11

You guys act like you have a constitutional right to petition the government.

12

Maybe that’s because under Obama someone actually took some time to think about the petition and make a thoughtful response to it.

13

Yes, I’m sure that’s what it was. If so, it would easily explain the $1M in savings, so there’s that!!

14

I first noticed this in February or so - the site wasn’t behaving properly. There were several petitions that were only showing a handful of signatures. I signed one, and the signature count didn’t reflect my signature. I will be very pleasantly shocked if the site is ever operational again.

15

“Your petition is very important to us…”

16

You mean the way Trump yells at the TV when CNN is talking?

17

New Trump version of the preamble to the Constitution begins: Fuck the people.

18

No, they act as if they have a constitutional right to petition the government via the internet.

19

No. Trump only watches Fox. CNN and MSNBC are fake news, remember.

20

Should they not?