How Citizens Moved the Government
1A bill can start in either house of Congress, though bills to raise taxes must start in the House. A committee studies it first. Both houses must pass the same wording. The President then has ten days, not counting Sundays, to act. He may sign the bill, or veto it and send it back. If he does neither while Congress is in session, the bill becomes law without his signature.
2Citizens shape the laws too. They vote for members of Congress and for President. They contact officials with letters and visits. The First Amendment protects their right to petition the government. In court, ordinary citizens serve on juries, which decide the facts of a case.
3Yosemite Valley in California had long been home to the Ahwahneechee people, and in 1851 a California militia unit forced many of them from the valley. By the 1860s tourists and settlers were arriving. In February 1864 Israel Raymond, a California businessman, wrote to Senator John Conness, urging that the valley be protected. Conness introduced a bill the next month. In the middle of the Civil War, both houses passed it, and President Abraham Lincoln signed it, granting the valley to California to protect “for public use, resort and recreation.”
4In 1871 Ferdinand Hayden led a government survey into the Yellowstone region, in the territories of Montana and Wyoming. Photographer William Henry Jackson took pictures of geysers and hot springs, and artist Thomas Moran made sketches. Back in Washington, Hayden showed Jackson’s photographs and rock samples to members of Congress and wrote to them about the land. Congress passed a bill to protect it, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it. The Shoshone, Bannock, Crow and other nations had hunted and gathered in the region for thousands of years. Lawmakers did not ask these nations, and later park rules kept them out.
5In these years, no state let women vote in national elections. Women’s rights leaders, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, petitioned Congress for the vote. On Election Day in 1872, Anthony and a group of other women voted in Rochester, New York. Weeks later she was arrested for voting illegally. At her trial, Justice Ward Hunt ruled that she had broken the law. He ordered the jury to find her guilty without letting the jurors talk it over. He fined her $100, which she refused to pay.