To protect democracy from machines, Congress must modernize our constitutional right to petition

It’s a bedrock American value etched into the First Amendment to the Constitution. Yet The right to petition is so overlooked that even Amy Coney Barrett blanked on it during her Supreme Court confirmation.

Congress used to maintain a petition docket in its workflow. That function was outsourced decades ago due to scale. Meanwhile, lobbying and advocacy have become the default information filters of the peoples’ voice. This institutional dereliction has narrowed and distorted Congress’s representative duties.

Today, the business of lawmaking is at risk of drowning in noise — imagine millions of junk ChatGPT petitions on top of the existing social media tsunami. Our centuries-old legislature can barely sort and filter by ZIP code, much less process a constant spew of vanity, conspiracy, screech and scandal. Even worse, lawmakers facing a never-sleeping phalanx of robot lobbyists may start wielding AI tools against their opponents to the further detriment of the nation’s business.

Congress, however, can short-circuit this digital sinkhole by revitalizing the First Amendment’s right to petition.

The communications revolution and its impact on America’s democratic institutions has graduated from a wicked problem to an existential crisis. Congress lacked an urgent commitment to technology and data until a pandemic and violence rocked the Capitol. The alarms being sounded now about the mix of synthetic media and generative capabilities such as ChatGPT are well-founded. But we also now have ways to filter out much of the garbage. We can protect democracy by re-imagining this original function with all the benefits of modern technical know-how.  

Historically, “the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” has been a capacity that enabled public participation in lawmaking. Prior to the 1940s, the Office of the House Clerk maintained a docket of petitions — something like a court docket — to track formal pleas to the House of Representatives and their response, which was expected in the same way we expect a response to a court pleading. According to legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk, the right to petition provided representation at a time when women, Black, brown and indigenous Americans could not vote and therefore had no regular access to the lawmaking process. The petition allowed unenfranchised Americans the same opportunity as those who could vote to connect to power, drawing attention to emerging issues. Many early petitions called for the abolition of slavery, while others centered on women’s suffrage, indigenous treaty rights, and patents. Petitions drove most of the House of Representatives’ work for generations.

After Congress shifted responsibility for the right to petition to administrative agencies in the mid 1900s, professional lobbying and advocacy largely replaced direct citizen action. Paid and issue-organized voices have created asymmetry in the direct representation that is so critical for a healthy democracy. Much citizen activism has shifted to online, signature-gathering campaigns. Yet Congress has no way to digest these digital petitions. If members of Congress disregard them, they effectively never happened.

An in-chamber 21st century version of grievance processing and issue input could be a way to sort and filter at a national scale, incentivize members to serve the broader public and encourage congressional accountability. The House and Senate should both have a system, adapted for each chamber.

By modernizing the right to petition, Congress can enact Terms of Service for digital democracy. A revitalized right to petition would serve as a national barometer, re-legitimizing democracy by helping Americans see themselves reflected in their own government, surfacing good ideas, signaling the need for course corrections, and perhaps even inspiring something long missing in Washington: trust.

Congress has already begun to level up to the contemporary world. The House of Representatives created a Select Committee on Modernization in 2019. The COVID pandemic required Congress to go online and strengthened the institution’s tech and data chops. Members now submit bills electronically and can track changes in bill text. The House even has a digital service. These changes are huge in a workflow built for Civil War-era formatting.

In 2020, Congress updated its communications standards, leaving behind the era of wax seals and the Pony Express and incorporating social media. These new rules include language to forbid deep fakes and require sourced data visualizations. As part of Congress’s active steps to use new governing technology, let’s bring back the right to petition as it was intended to be — a First Amendment right designed for a representative system.

Indirect and representative at once, Congress is by design a compromise between popular access and the prerogatives of elected power. Congress writes all the checks, determines war and peace, and archives the mission critical data of democracy. These reasons alone make it worth caring about. Though maligned and castigated, Congress is an institution that must be defended.

At present, the sole secret weapon that politics has against machines is that political success will always involve showing up in person. In the age of synthetic media, transparency and evidence-based data are required for the institution to protect public goods. British mathematicians recognized that only a machine could defeat Germany’s Enigma code in World War II. Today, a Congress now faced with machines trained on unfathomable amounts of data can only safeguard itself and democracy with accountable, auditable public information.

Time is of the essence. While Congress is modernizing, it should move swiftly to revitalize the Constitution’s right to petition.

Lorelei Kelly is founder of GeoDES–Georgetown Democracy, Education + Service at the McCourt School of Public Policy. Previously she was a fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown, and led the Smart Congress initiative with the Open Technology Institute at New America.