It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [85]
In any political unit where there was some stability and continuity, one could expect that there would be efforts to create judicial institutions which would improve internal security and financial institutions which would provide the revenues necessary for defense against an external enemy.1
Such institutions are indeed the proper role of government and were particularly necessary amidst the violence of the Middle Ages.
The alternative to the right to petition was a violent regime change. When grievances go unanswered, history demonstrates that the aggrieved will inevitably seek to overthrow those in power. The English were acutely aware of the role that the right played in maintaining a healthy political system: “To traduce such petitioning [is] a violation of [royal] duty, and to represent it to his majesty as tumultuous and seditious is to betray the liberty of the subject, and contribute to the design of subverting the ancient legal constitution of this kingdom, and introducing arbitrary power.”2 Many historians posit that Britain was able to avoid the bloody revolutions on the European continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because the right to petition secured for the people a participatory role in government. Thus, the stability of the political system was largely based upon the ability of the King’s subjects to request that certain actions be taken, and the corresponding expectation that the King would respond to those petitions and evenhandedly redress their grievances, and enhanced by the transparency that petitions necessarily brought about.
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The right to petition was also essential to the development of popular sovereignty. This theory holds that, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” The right to petition furthers popular sovereignty by making the government accountable to the people for all of its wrongs and misguided policies; petitions are not mere prayers or requests, but demands made by the masters (the people) to their servants (the government). If, however, the people were the servants of the government, then the government’s interests would always be superior to those of the people, and it would be oxymoronic to demand that the government redress its violations of the people’s natural rights. President John Quincy Adams succinctly stated the role that the right to petition plays in our political system: “The right of petition . . . is essential to the very existence of government; it is the right of the people over the Government; it is their right, and they may not be deprived of it.” Thus if we lose the ability to petition the government, we also lose our right to demand that the government protect our freedoms instead of merely enhancing its own power.
One of the most essential features of the right was that the people remain immune from punishment for petitions made to the government. The most important event in securing this component of the right was the famous Seven Bishops Case. During the seventeenth century, the English Parliament seriously curtailed the rights of Catholics to participate in government. As a response, in 1687 the Catholic monarch King James II issued his Declaration of Indulgence which negated those restrictions, and later demanded that the Declaration be read aloud during Protestant church services. The predominantly Protestant English citizenry nonetheless perceived this action as an encroachment upon the sovereignty of Parliament and an initial attempt to re-establish Catholicism as the state religion. Believing the command to be an illegal exercise of authority, a number of senior