2024
March
04
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

March 04, 2024
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Today we take a deep look at President Joe Biden, courtesy of Washington Bureau Chief Linda Feldmann, a seasoned observer of White House occupants.

Linda was there to read the room recently when customers at a Black-owned barbershop in South Carolina found the president of the United States at their elbow during an impromptu visit. She’s talked with Mr. Biden while he chatted up the press on Air Force One. Those are just two of many encounters. 

“There’s no substitute for seeing a person up close,” Linda says. “You can look [a president] in the eye – and as famous, pilloried, or misrepresented as they may be, you connect with their humanity.”

As we enter a kickoff week for the presidential race, it’s worth connecting with Linda’s profile of a president.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

Luis M. Alvarez/AP
President Joe Biden gives a thumbs-up before boarding Air Force One, Feb. 16, 2024, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

President Biden’s decades of experience have brought valuable perspective, supporters say. Yet the next president will face uniquely modern challenges. Is Mr. Biden’s age a liability or an asset? It may be both.

Today’s news briefs

• France moves on abortion: French lawmakers approve a bill that will enshrine a woman’s right to an abortion in the constitution. The vote in an exceptional joint session of the parliament was 780-72.
• Guilty plea: Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg will be sentenced to five months in jail for perjury in a civil fraud case about former President Donald Trump’s financial statements.
• Taking office in Pakistan: Shehbaz Sharif becomes prime minister for a second time, a day after Parliament elected him despite protests from some lawmakers and accusations that the vote was rigged.
• Haiti emergency: Authorities order a nighttime curfew after armed gangs freed thousands of incarcerated people from Haiti’s two biggest prisons. The prime minister is seeking a United Nations-backed security mission, led by Kenya.

Read these news briefs.

The U.S. Supreme Court moved unanimously in deciding that states can’t kick Donald Trump off ballots – and in effect left voters to decide whether the former president’s 2020 election moves are disqualifying.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
Ukrainian Olha Poltoratska holds her 9-month-old son, Ruslan, while daughter Dariia looks on, in a converted student dormitory that houses 178 Ukrainians displaced by war, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Feb. 14, 2024.

With billions of dollars in additional U.S. aid to Ukraine held up in Congress for months, the impact is being felt not only by soldiers at the front, but also by civilians displaced by war and dependent on generosity.

Books

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Terri Accomazzo, editorial director of Angel City Press, shows off books published by the press Jan. 16, 2024. “There’s something really valuable in trying to reflect a true portrait of [Los Angeles],” she says.

Book publishing involves deciding what titles the public could and should be reading. In an unprecedented but natural alliance, a local press in Los Angeles will now be run by the city’s public library. 

In Pictures

Oscar Espinosa
Yoshiko Hidaka (left), the most recent resident of Nagaya Tower, kayaks the Kotsuki River with Kawasaki Masatoshi. Ms. Yoshiko chose their building because she thought it would be easy to make friends among its mix of generations.

In an aging and often isolated society, these multigenerational apartment dwellers in southwestern Japan make togetherness a priority.


The Monitor's View

AP
The Supreme Court is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 4.

Two years ago, a New York Times columnist concluded that political polarization among Americans “has created its own vicious circle.” It has been “weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis.” Yet with what many Americans now perceive as a crisis – the possible reelection of Donald Trump as president – the Supreme Court on Monday tried to set an example of calm consensus-making.

In a ruling that itself could have been highly polarized, all nine justices agreed that the Constitution does not allow states to bar Mr. Trump from a ballot for federal office even if a state deems the former president guilty of insurrection for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress, as Colorado had done in this case.

One justice in particular, Amy Coney Barrett, wanted people to know how much the court worked together for judicial harmony. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” she wrote in a concurring opinion. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.

“For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case. That is the message Americans should take home.”

One minor difference among the justices was on whether Congress or another entity should now, after this decision, set the rules for barring candidates under the post-Civil War constitutional amendment aimed at keeping insurrectionists from holding federal office. A majority who supported the role of Congress acknowledged the minority’s dissent. Yet it added that all the reasons given in the ruling help “provide a complete explanation for the judgment the Court unanimously reaches.”

The ruling hints that the current justices, despite past court decisions that widened political divisions, are selecting cases and deciding on them in ways to lessen polarization. The fact that the court so quickly decided this case to accommodate the presidential primaries shows it may be mindful of its public role in taking measured and deliberative approaches to groundbreaking questions.

When asked what she saw as threats to the rule of law, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg replied, “The problems of indifference, of tribal-like loyalties, lack of observance of the golden rule, ‘Do unto others.’” She and her ideological opponent on the court, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, were friends with a high respect for one another. They often helped take harsh edges off the other’s written opinions.

Perhaps a similar respect among the current justices was behind Monday’s unanimous decision. For Americans who won’t even talk to their political opposites, that is indeed a message to “take home.”


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Letting God inform our perspective of ourselves and others frees us from unhelpful rumination over perceived flaws and opens the door to joy and progress.


Viewfinder

Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, try to get internet service on their phones through Egyptian networks, March 4, 2024. The war between Israel and Hamas has made it extremely difficult for people to communicate with family members and friends.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us as you start your week. Tomorrow, watch for our story from Mexico City-based correspondent Whitney Eulich, on how shelters and clinics serving migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border adapt to ever-changing policies.

More issues

2024
March
04
Monday
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