In this paper, I will compare Kernell's article on “going public to President Biden asking
Congress for funding for Ukraine and Israel to aid them in their wars. In his article, Kernell
states that the president can use his platform to go public and incentivize the legislators to vote
on what the president wants. Kernell explains that this would work because the legislators are up
for reelection every two years. If the president gathers public support, this will help him when he
calls out a legislator and says that that legislator is voting against what their constituents want,
this would shed a bad light on the legislature and pressure them to vote with their constituents.
The idea here is that in order to get what the president or what the legislator wants they would
rally the public support which in turn would essentially peer pressure the legislators into voting
for the bill in order to be viewed in a positive light by the public and their constituents. This
makes it a lot harder for the legislator not to vote with how their constituents may want. Kernell
also says that an alternative to going public is bargaining, however, he states that this is much
more difficult to do in a divided government like ours and it he says that it is much easier to use
the tactic of going public.
The current event that I am writing about is that President Biden is trying to push
Congress to approve a bill that would send aid to Ukraine and Israel. The goal here by President
Biden is that he wants to get money to give to Ukraine and Israel to help with their war efforts.
The bill that President Biden wants to pass asks for a hundred-five billion dollar aid package split
between Israel and Ukraine. The problem with this bill is one, that it is a lot of money and
Americans are hesitant to give that much money, and two, that many Republicans do not want to
send any more money to Ukraine. The public view on funding Ukraine is split pretty much in
half, one side argues that we are already in debt as a country and we can't afford it while the
other half says that we need to help them because we are their allies.Due to this, the House
