The White House is officially sick of having to respond so often to petitions from”We the People.”
The Obama administration announced in a statement Tuesday evening on its “We the People” petition site that “starting today [Tuesday], as we move into a second term, petitions must receive 100,000 signatures in 30 days in order to receive an official response from the Obama Administration.”
This announcement comes after the White House was forced to respond to a petition demanding the U.S. commission a Death Star, the fictional space station in the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, after the petition met the received more than 25,000 signatures, the previous threshold to receive an official White House response. While the White House wittily answered back that it “does not support blowing up planets,” they have clearly had enough of the absurdity.
This is the second time the White House raised the bar for signatures since the petition site launched in September 2011. The number of signatures required to receive a response from the White House was increased from 5,000 signatures to 25,000 just a month later in October of 2011 after the new site’s unexpected success.
“When we launched We the People, none of us knew how popular it would be, but it’s exceeded our wildest expectations,” the White House said said Tuesday.
The White House explained that its “making another adjustment to ensure we’re able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve.”
The We the People petitions have doubled in the last two months of 2012, according to the statement. Not coincidentally, those were the two months following the presidential election.
The fact that a petition to give Vice President Joe Biden his own reality TV show has nearly reached the 25,000 signature threshold was likely a factor in the White House’s decision to limit the number of potentially embarrassing demands it has to respond to. The White House still would have had to respond to a petition to deport CNN host Piers Morgan regardless of the new threshold, however, as the petition garnered more than 100,000 signatures.
The White House would also have had to issue a general response to the slew of petitions that sprang up after November’s election demanding various states’ secession from the U.S. because Texas’ petition received more than 125,000 signatures.
