A truly deep understanding of the original intent of the Constitution at work here.
The first day of this hearing is a tragedy; the second day is a farce.
I will say if she remembered speech, press, religion, and assembly but forgot “petition for redress of grievances” then this is a nonissue, because that one is like confusingly worded and everyone forgets that one; and you could argue, based on the wording, that it’s not a fifth separate right from the right to assembly, but is just part of the right to assembly.
It almost doesn’t need to be mentioned, it’s assumed that the reason for protecting freedom of speech, press, and assembly is for protecting the right to ask for redress of grievances.
Petitions are weird, they were kind of a people’s way of forcing something onto a legislative agenda – in an age when even the House of Commons was bourgeois, sending out representatives, spreading the word from village to village, getting a mass movement of common people to pledge their names to something, march on the capitol, and demand the government address their concerns…
Looked a lot like a peasant’s uprising, and was often suppressed as such.
America used to have a real thing like that Obama-era website where petitions with enough signatures would be brought up in Congress. So abolitionists were always doing petition campaigns to end slavery, at which point all the Southern representatives and the Northerners who did not particularly want the country to collapse right then would vote no, irritated, until they started preemptively squelching them
