Public opinion more effectively reins in the presidency than the other branches, Douglas Kriner, the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Studies in the government department, writes in an op-ed in the Washington Post, citing this week's outcry over the Trump administration's proposed changes to the U.S. Postal Service. But that may be changing, he says.
“This isn’t the first public backlash to force the Trump administration — or previous presidents — to backtrack,” Kriner wrote in the piece. “Public opinion — more than constitutional checks and balances — provides the strongest brake against presidents attempting to act without congressional support.”
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
