There was actually a meta-petition[1] recently that was asking for the White House to pay more attention to these petitions, so it seems like these petitions are mostly ignored

[1] https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/%21/petition/actually-...

The petitions are looked at if they receive enough signatures, right now this one needs a little over 23,000 more signatures by November 30th.

I would view it as one more avenue of making your opinion known to elected officials. In addition to informing your congressperson and senator to try to prevent the bill from passing this would be a way to endorse a veto from the executive branch.

I believe it does as much good as anything else you can do in the amount of time it takes to sign it.

Not sure about how these work in the US but I know in Britain our e-petitions have some rule whereby if they get over a certain threshold of signitures (around 100,000 I believe) then the house of commons must assign time to talk about the issues.

The problem being that most of the petitions that get any significant number of signitures are predictable , populist stuff like "Britain should leave the EU" , "bring back hanging" and "legalise Marijuana" , basically stuff that if the government had any inclination to do they would have already done by now so really all it does is waste everybody's time.

I've been utterly disappointed at the handful of official responses so far (http://blog.norml.org/2011/10/29/white-house-response-to-nor...), but it's worthwhile giving it a shot, no?

While you're there, I'm also a fan of the petitions that the petitions be taken seriously.

I find it even stranger that this petition is on whitehouse.gov. The real issue though is that this bill wont die, I'm sick of hearing of its lunacy and the fact that it's even in the house irks me to no end. That's why I signed it.

In terms of effort:outcome ratio, it probably ranks somewhere under "voting" and somewhere over "arguing on the Internet". Your call.

Given how easy it is to sign it, does it matter?