It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [84]
A federal district court judge dismissed We the People v. United States. The court pointed to two inapposite Supreme Court cases as support. Specifically, the district court reasoned that if employment-related petitions made by government employees did not trigger a duty to respond, neither did petitions made by United States citizens for the enforcement of constitutional rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York affirmed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. To further silence the petitioning activities of organizations such as We the People, the Congress amended the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 to provide for five-thousand-dollar fines for anyone who submitted a so-called “specified frivolous submission” to the IRS. Among a host of others, frivolous submissions included arguments that “a taxpayer may withhold payment of taxes or the filing of a tax return until the [IRS] or other government entity responds to a First Amendment petition for redress of grievances.” Thus, the government not only took the stance that it was not bound by the Constitution, but that individuals could be punished harshly for attempting to exercise their constitutional right to hold the government accountable for its illegal conduct.
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Why is it that a government can transgress our natural rights, and then so easily avoid responsibility when organizations such as We the People attempt to hold the government responsible? Isn’t there a fundamental human yearning to right those wrongs which have been committed against us, regardless of whether the transgressor was an individual or a government, American or foreign? As we shall see, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances guarantees individuals a liberty to demand that legislatures take a particular action, and to sue the government when it breaks the law. For centuries, this has been one of the most jealously guarded rights in the Anglo-American legal systems. Moreover, implicit in this right is the self-evident truth that government is the servant of the people, and not the other way around. Understanding the crucial role that the right to petition plays in free governments, our Founders enshrined it in the Constitution so that future generations might enjoy the blessings of liberty.
Nonetheless, growing weary of receiving complaints regarding slavery during the antebellum era, the federal government took the position that it had no duty to respond to or even read petitions. Moreover, the government has enacted rules which allow for sanctions against parties bringing so-called frivolous lawsuits. All of these rules and doctrines have swept away those components of the right which history has taught us is necessary for liberty, and in so doing eviscerated one of our constitutionally mandated protections from government interference. As in all of these chapters, we shall see that the culprit has been a push for larger government and unconstitutional legislation. Only when our rights, especially the right to petition, have been cut down, can government gain complete control of our lives and fully sate its thirst for power.
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The Right of the People over Their Government
The right to petition the government for redress of grievances is one of the oldest and most well-established rights in our legal history, leading the prominent lawyer Norman B. Smith to call it in 1986 “the cornerstone of the Anglo-American constitutional system[s].” The development of the right to petition paralleled an increasingly stable government in medieval England. Rather than use warfare and coercion to effectuate political change, barons were able to petition the King peacefully to redress their grievances. In fact, petitions became an