Daily Inspiration Quote by Caleb Cushing

Cushing’s sentence is a lawyer’s cudgel disguised as a moral warning: if you try to muzzle a petition, the fallout is on you. The opening clause, “Be the responsibility on their heads,” isn’t casual blame-shifting; it’s a ritual transfer of liability, a way of naming future consequences in advance and pinning them to a particular faction. He’s writing as a diplomat-politician steeped in parliamentary combat, using the language of legitimacy to make censorship sound not merely wrong, but dangerous.

The “novel and extraordinary question of reception” is the tell. He’s not arguing about whether citizens can petition; he’s arguing about whether Congress can refuse even to receive a petition. That distinction mattered in the 1830s-1840s petition wars, when antislavery activists flooded Congress with petitions and pro-slavery forces pushed “gag rules” to table them without discussion. By calling the maneuver “novel,” Cushing frames it as an improvisation, not a tradition; by calling it “extraordinary,” he hints it’s an emergency pretext posing as procedure.

His key move is constitutional jujitsu: reception becomes the battleground because debate can be throttled before it begins. If lawmakers can block the doorway, they don’t have to argue inside the house. So Cushing elevates petitioning into a “great right… inherent in the People,” a phrase meant to outrank partisan convenience. The subtext is a warning about democratic optics: suppress the paper trail of dissent and you don’t quiet the public, you delegitimize the institution trying to silence it.