For some reason I'm reminded of Colonel Carthcart in Catch-22[1], who continually raised the number of missions crew had to fly to complete a tour of duty.
It's almost like the Whitehouse put the site up to listen to and respond to the people that elected them, but has to raise the barriers so that it doesn't have to listen to and respond to the people that elected them. If that's not Catch-22 in the US government, then I'm not sure what is.
Yet somehow I think there would be people peeved knowing that the White House pays a staff to write a reply to every petition that gets the number of signatures equivalent to the number of retweets Justin Bieber gets when he blinks.
And yes, a "staff", because someone has to sort/collate the petitions, write the response, and also legally/factually vet the response, as it isn't a reddit post but something that is the official voice of the government
Here's a legitimate question that I'd like to know the answer to.
How many petitions on the White House petition site, regardless of the number of signatories have resulted in a direct change to US policy, in favour of the petition? I think people should be getting more peeved about the answer to that question than the number of staff writing non-responses to them.
I only see one: "Legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group" with approx 300k signatures. The next highest has 80k signatures. (I'm assuming that the "popular" petitions are ranked by number of signatures, which appears to be the case.)
