From Steven Avery to Justin Bieber: It’s time to cool it with the White House petitions
Late in 2015, incensed by the perceived lack of justice afforded to Steven Avery (as documented in Netflix’s new Making A Murderer series), someone with the initials “D.R.” sat down in San Bruno, California; typed WhiteHouse.Gov in their URL bar; and petitioned the president to pardon Avery. While that might seem like a noble enough cause—if Avery wasn’t given a fair trial, perhaps the president could do something about it?—it was a fool’s errand in more ways than one. In practical terms, Avery was convicted of a Wisconsin state charge, so it’s the governor’s prerogative to pardon, not the president’s, as the White House explained in its response to the petition. Second, and more to the point, it simply shouldn’t be the president or his staff’s responsibility to react to every pop culture-inspired whim the American people have.
Yes, the Avery petition has its roots in actual criminal justice even if it was sparked by a Netflix show, but it’s just the latest in a string of misguided petitions submitted the We The People petition site. While most are politically inspired—recall Barack Hussein Obama, outlaw the Tea Party, “take action to fight secret money immediately—and redeem your failed money in politics legacy,” whatever that means—the petitions that have historically gotten the most ink aren’t the ones based in pure justice. Instead, they’re the ones like, “Change the national anthem to R. Kelly’s 2003 hit ‘Ignition (Remix),’” or “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016,” a petition so popular that it led the White House to change the number of signatures required before it officially responds to a campaign. (The minimum is now 100,000, up from 25,000.)
A government official told Mother Jones back in 2013 that silly petitions like the Death Star one are fine because the We The People site “puts some bureaucrats out of their comfort zones and reminds everyone we are working for the people,” that doesn’t mean that the people’s whims—this writer’s included—aren’t inane sometimes. Moreover, just because we can fill out a brief internet form encouraging the president to deport Canadian nightmare Justin Bieber back to the Great White North doesn’t mean we should.
There are a few reasons for such a cessation, not all of which are entirely chiding. First off, let’s be practical about this. The president’s a busy guy. Not only does neither he nor his staff have time to care about Justin Bieber’s immigration status, he might not have the actual power to do something about it, à la the Avery petition mentioned above. Beyond that, sometimes querying the president just isn’t the way to get the job done in the most efficient fashion. While it might be cool, for example, for the U.S. government to somehow push all its military funding toward the construction of a Death Star, the bureaucracy of that project would be a nightmare. You’d have to get countless politicians and government operatives on board, which could take decades. The Death Star is a project for the private sector. Petition Richard Branson—he’s already dabbling in the space race and can single-handedly allot funds for, at the very least, an exploratory committee examining the logistics of a planet-vaporizing battle station. (Let’s use #BuildADeathStarBranson, and direct everything to @RichardBranson.)