![]() ![]() There had been only eight faithless electors since 1900, each in a different election. But there were more defections, or so-called "faithless electors" who voted for someone other than the candidate their state selected, than during any election in the past century. Trump won 304 electoral votes to Clinton's 227 votes when electors cast their ballots Monday in their respective state capitals. Alexander Hamilton would reject Donald Trump, opponents argue, not because of his policies and what he wants to do, but because of who he is. The Electoral College exists to coolly vet the people’s choice in light of the national interest, in this view. Russian hacking might have swayed the election, they add, and Trump’s foreign business entanglements seem worrisome. His character is suspect, according to his critics, as shown by his bizarre tweets, rambling speeches, and constant disregard of facts. The argument behind the lobbying is that Trump is the kind of candidate the Founding Fathers worried about. Some groups argue that the Electoral College exists as a check on the democratic process to prevent an unqualified candidate from making it into the White House, which is why groups recently lobbied individual electors in hopes of dissuading them from voting for Trump, as the Monitor reported: ![]() What is behind a huge drop in the murder rate this year? The phenomenon, reflected in a record high distrust of the mainstream media and the proliferation of fake news on social media, has been exacerbated by the candidacy of Donald Trump, who, since the start of his campaign last year has made frequent false claims and emotional appeals to his supporters while denouncing facts as conspiracies concocted by the other side. The poll highlights a common theme throughout the 2016 presidential election lamented by those on both sides of the partisan aisle: a widespread rejection of facts in favor of ideas that confirm one's own pre-existing political bias. But the notion that widespread voter fraud is to blame for Clinton's popular vote win still lingers.ĭespite widespread media reporting on the election's preliminary outcome, a majority of Republicans – 52 percent – told pollsters, incorrectly, that Trump had won the popular vote as well as the Electoral vote, as The Christian Science Monitor's Gretel Kauffman reported last week: That assertion was immediately challenged, and no evidence has surfaced to substantiate it. In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally- Donald J. Over the summer we’ll consider other reparations issues and locales.Building community is hard work, but it might be the fulcrum that lets us balance looking back and moving forward. Treating people well comes with thinking of them that way.Having achieved this, the entire community experiences abundance, “like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” It earns the name “repairer of the breach” and can “build the old waste places.”If today’s debate over reparations builds community, that sounds like progress to me, whatever decision is reached.Today’s issue, dedicated to reparations, looks at slavery, forced assimilation, and territorial dispossession – in the United States, Barbados, and Canada. And behind those good actions, Isaiah indicates, are good attitudes – compassion and humility. People feed the hungry, free the oppressed, undo heavy burdens. We have to move forward, somehow. To try to understand what might promote that, I turned to the world’s most-read book, the Bible. This phrase in Isaiah 58 piqued my interest: “repairer of the breach.”Here, the repairer isn’t a carpenter or mason but a caring community. That’s what researchers working with Saint Louis University are doing to learn about those enslaved by Jesuits at the school.Yet no amount of looking back can recompense historical harms. We can’t go back and undo the horrors of the middle passage or the sundering of families at slave auctions.What restoration is possible centuries later?A first step can be looking back and taking an honest accounting of the past. That’s where the hard work happens to restore, renew, make whole. ![]() But the shorter word it comes from – repair – strikes me as even bigger.As a noun, reparations suggests that a decision has been reached about concrete actions to redress past wrongs. As a verb, repair is a process. ![]()
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