You have no right to petition the government, and if you do you will be punished by death.
Result: Citizens do not petition the government
You have an absolute right to petition the government, but they will ignore your petition and won’t give it any kind of consideration.
Result: Citizens do not petition the government.
The first amendment seems to have little teeth if there is not a good faith requirement on the government’s part to consider and reply to a petition.
True. But you will get usually get a response if you call your congressman. That’s why we have elections, we can get new representatives if the old ones aren’t operating with that good faith. And without that good faith, none of our rights are worth much.
Note that congresspeople will generally respect certain limits on their power of constituent inquiry. Suppose, for instance, you write in to your congressman to say, “the FBI has been parking outside my house, and I’d like them to stop.” You might be able to persuade him to write to the local US Attorney’s Office, but the USAO is going to respond, “We love you, but we can’t comment,” and in almost all cases, the congressman is going to respect that.
The concept is somewhat more nuanced than this black and white version. The context of the time lay in the history of events leading up to the Revolution: that the British Parliament and, even more, the King did not consider colonists to be legitimate claimants for their attention. This had been a part of colonial governments; a formal petition to the legislature would result in a formal response.
As with most aspects of the Bill of Rights, the writers of the Constitution evidently assumed that American legislatures, given this history, would always listen to the public and didn’t need to say so specifically. People wanted this written down, though, and so it was made part of the First Amendment.
Again, nothing about a specific response was written down. What a response constituted was left to the social compact. At first, it was indeed assumed that the legislature would not ignore the petition - they would formally argue it, a consideration different from taking positive action. If every petition resulted in a changed law then the whole system of representative government is altered. But what worked with the tiny numbers of citizens close to home became unwieldy and abused in a national setting.
That’s just the abstract; the whole article is behind a pay wall and I haven’t read it.
But here’s my summary. What he’s referring to is the Gag Rule passed by Congress in 1837. It was rescinded in 1844 but Congress, dominated by and often controlled by the South, managed to keep discussion of slavery to a minimum until the pressure built into war.
The principle remained. Citizen petitions were not going to set legislative agendas. In practical terms, better communication and transportation meant that legislators had more contact with their constituents leading to the modern system of letters, emails, town halls, local offices, and all the other ways that they interact. It’s back to an implied social compact. And, of course, the ever-present threat to vote them out of office.
It works pretty well, despite the gridlock of these hyperpartisan days. Nobody expects that Congress is going to send armed troops to round up protesters (well, in fact some do expect that but the rest of us are more afraid of them than of Congress) and legislators spend all their time not raising money hearing from people who want redress and probably hear it most of their money-raising time as well. The clause is treated about the same as the 3rd Amendment, not quartering soldiers in homes. Both are relics of a specific time and have little practical meaning in a modern world. The principles behind them are not ignored but the world is so different that the treatment is similarly different.
A lot of people have been commenting about the implied threat to a government when a Congressional office calls, but that is of minor importance in many cases.
In my experience, the most important part is the experience of the Congressional staff, in that they have dealt with this same kind of problem many times before. They know just what letter to write, what info is needed in the letter, and exactly who to send it to. That can shortcut all kinds of bureaucratic routing issues, sending it back for more info, etc., which makes it much easier to solve a problem.
When I was working in the local County Veterans Service office, we were informed about what we thought was an outrageous and unique problem*. I ended up calling the Congressmans local office manager (who I had helped when his car broke down earlier that week). After explaining the problem, I was astonished to be told that they dealt with that 2-3 times a year, and it was a ‘routine’ matter. And it was; they got it solved within a few weeks.
Knowing who to talk to, and what info they need, really can lead to quick fixes.
An immigrant had applied to get US citizenship, and was eventually sent notice to appear before a hearing board. Wen he didn’t appear, his application was denied. He didn’t appear because he had joined the US Military, and was serving on the front lines in Iraq at the time of the hearing! Whuich the Immigration Service didn’t think was a valid excuse.
Further to the TriPolar/jtgain/Exapno Mapcase dsicussion earlier:
If I like a book, movie, song, or TV show, it matters little except to me. If I an 50,000 others like said book/movie/song/show, it becomes a smash hit.
The typical Congressman can ignore the letter from the constituent wanting him to get the CIA to remove the agents they have spying on him disguised as beef cattle, just like his earlier letters about the U.S. having had no legal currency since 1974.
But if a Congressman and his staff become complacent and do not service their constituents adequately, or focus on a particular ideological subgroup of constituents, he becomes vulnerable at the polls. This happened to my own former congressman last election.