White House Petitions Now Need 100,000 Signatures To Get Response

If you scroll through the We The People website, you’ll see petitions on topics about gun control, hate crimes, and marijuana laws. You’ll also see a few petitions about beer recipes, deporting Piers Morgan, and the need to build a Death Star. Petitions needed 25,000 signatures to get a response from the White House, but now the government is raising the threshold to 100,000.

A statement on WhiteHouse.gov:

“When we launched We The People, none of us knew how popular it would be, but it’s exceeded our wildest expectations. Through the past year, interest in We the People exploded and we’re closing in on 10 million signatures … Starting today, 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 new threshold applies only to petitions created from this point forward and is not retroactively applied to ones that already exist.”

The administration notes that more than 2 million people joined the user system in the last two months of 2012. In the same time period, more than 73,000 petitions were created and close to 5 million signatures were written.

Needless to say, the White House needs a little break from all of the traffic.

The White House noted that the new 100,000 signature threshold will only have to be crossed by new petitions. That means that the White House will still have to respond to petitions about classifying the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group, repealing Obamacare, and making the metric system the standard in the United States.