While the prohibition of abridgment of the right to petition originally referred only to the federal legislature (the Congress) and courts, the incorporation doctrine later expanded the protection of the right to its current scope, over all state and federal courts and legislatures and the executive branches of the state[8] and federal governments. The right to petition includes under its umbrella the legal right to sue the government,[9] and the right of individuals, groups and possibly corporations to lobby the government.
Do you have a problem with lobbyists working in the departments they used to lobby on behalf of their clients? And who then end up working directly for those clients when their tenure in govt. is over and they have done those companies plenty of solids while in government?
I don’t see anything in the bill of rights about losing your right to petition the government to redress grievances if you used to work for government. If there are individual instances of corruption, address them individually.
Lobbying is clearly defined. Lobbyists have a requirement to register as such with the govt. so, that is precisely who the article is counting. Not loose at all.
re: the swamp, the revolving door of lobbyists/govt. workers, through which people who represent private concerns go on to work int eh departments that governern those private concerns, bending policy to match their old client’s interests, and thusly earning the reward of cushy jobs when their govt. tenure is over is - for me - an obviously element of the ‘swamp’ imagery.
It is of course impossible to know what trump was talking about because he never defined his rhetoric, but I think it’s fair minded to suggest most people share my association of lobbyist in government with ‘the swamp.’
I see it as the entrenched rub-my-back-and-I’ll-rub-yours Political Establishment which even the President must accommodate. A lot of the swamp has nothing to do with lobbyists.
Well, perhaps that’s true when viewed through your political prism.
There is a difference between individuals exercising their rights to petition for redress of grievances on their own and individuals being paid large sums to advocate for positions that we don’t even know if those individuals believe in.
If one considers the Constitution in the light of what the framers intended, do you think that their notion of petitioning for redress of grievances extended to paid spokespersons for large industries?
It’s also combined with the “it’s more of a slough than a swamp and the individual parts of a slough don’t necessarily make the slough a swamp” defense.
