Prof. Douglas Kriner, author of "Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power," explains in this Washington Post op-ed how public opinion impacts the war powers of both the U.S. president and Congress.
He writes that despite the Constitution dividing war powers between the president and Congress, power has increasingly accrued to the presidency and that since 9/11, Congress would seem to be losing its battles over foreign policy.
"But it’s not that simple. Research finds that public opinion — which both shapes and is shaped by Congress’s reactions — can constrain what presidents want to do," writes Kriner, the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions in the Department of Government in the College of Arts & Sciences.
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.
