Kevin Drum

The Supreme Court is apparently bound and determined to leave its most controversial cases until the very last week of the term. That would be next Thursday, when we'll finally get rulings on Trump's immunity, Chevron deference, and more.

This week all we got was a boring tax case that no one cares much about. It revolves around the esoteric question of whether Congress can tax overseas profits even if those profits have been reinvested in the company. The only interesting thing about this is that taxing unrealized profits is kinda sorta like a wealth tax. If the court overturned this provision, it might mean they'd overturn a wealth tax too.

But they didn't:

The vote was 7 to 2, with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh writing the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and the court’s three liberals. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., and Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

All of the liberals and most of the conservatives agreed to uphold the tax. I'm not sure this really means all that much, but to the extent it does it's a win for liberals and continues the Trump court's habit of being not quite as conservative as most people think (or hoped).

Housing starts were down in May, continuing a trend since the construction peak of early 2022:

It's not as if housing starts have collapsed: they're now at the same level as they were right before the pandemic, following a decade-long rise after the housing bust of 2006-09.

This slowdown is one of the things that makes me skeptical of the "housing crisis" narrative. We clearly have the ability to build more houses—land use regulations or no—and the price of housing continues to be high. This means new construction is profitable. But for some reason homebuilders have nevertheless slowed down the pace of new residential construction. I'm not sure what could account for this nationwide aside from relatively weak demand.

There's a housing shortage in California for sure, but it's mostly thanks to strong opposition to new homebuilding. The rest of the country doesn't generally share California's chilly attitude toward more people. Outside of the Golden State, I'm skeptical that homes are really in short supply.

From Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israeli military:

This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear — it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public. Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — whoever thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.

This was instantly walked back, but Hagari was just stating the obvious. It's barely noteworthy except for the fact that high-ranking public figures usually avoid ever stating the obvious.

In the Wall Street Journal today, former judge Michael McConnell tries to explain to us Democrats why Republicans are sticking with Donald Trump despite all the court cases against him.

First he argues that the New York hush money case was bogus. Fair enough. It's an arguable point. But he also says this:

Many Republicans who condemned his part in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and thought he should have been impeached and convicted for it now consider the legal crusade against Mr. Trump to be as threatening to democracy as what happened that day. Democrats need to understand why.

This is odd. McConnell says lots of Republicans think Trump should have been convicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection, but later on he dismisses as "lawfare" the current federal case against Trump for his part in January 6. Why?

And it gets worse. Even McConnell has to admit that the classified documents case is sound:

But here too, the odor of selective prosecution is hard to escape. Not only did Mrs. Clinton mishandle classified documents, so did Mr. Biden. In fact, he shared them with a ghostwriter after leaving the vice presidency. Special counsel Robert Hur determined that Mr. Biden’s actions were “willful” but declined to prosecute.

....Bottom line: Both candidates for president appear to have violated the same law; the one in power is excused and his opponent faces trial.

This is the worst sort of sophistry. Trump is not being prosecuted for "mishandling" classified documents and McConnell knows it. As usual in Journal op-eds, what's important is what's left out.

Clinton and Biden both mishandled a small number of unimportant documents and cooperated completely with investigators. By contrast, Trump is being prosecuted because he took highly classified documents; he took lots of them; he refused to return them; he ignored subpoenas; and he aggressively tried to hide them even from an FBI search. McConnell knows this. So do the Journal's editorial page editors.

But they don't care. For the good of the cause, this all has to be shoehorned into a narrative of "Democratic lawfare" instead of acknowledging it as the entirely predictable result of a president who happens to be a serious serial lawbreaker. I'm not sure why this has to be repeatedly explained to Republicans.

Louisiana has decided that all schools in the state should display the Ten Commandments:

The law gives schools until Jan. 1 to display the Ten Commandments — religious and ethical directives outlined in the Bible — on “a poster or framed document that is at least eleven inches by fourteen inches” in every classroom. The commandments have to be the display’s “central focus” and be “printed in a large, easily readable font.”

And not just any Ten Commandments, either. The Protestant Ten Commandments:

I wonder what translation they settled on? It has lots of "thou shalts," but it also bowdlerizes "ox and ass" to "cattle." I don't recognize it, but you can't have the word ass around little children, I guess.

We'll see how this plays out. A local judge will probably approve it, and the Fifth Circuit probably will too even though it's plainly illegal under current precedent. Then it's on to the Supreme Court, which banned the Ten Commandments in schools many decades ago. But it was a 5-4 decision. I suppose it could easily go the other way now that we have more committed conservatives on the court.

I continue to be completely befuddled by the scope of the food problems in Gaza. For starters, here are the UN's overall numbers:

This suggests that 330,000 Gazans are experiencing acute malnutrition and at least 220 are currently dying of malnutrition every day. This comes to nearly 30,000 people dead of malnutrition since January.

How about children? A few days ago the UN reported that "Over 50,000 children require treatment for acute malnutrition." They have been reporting the same number since April. But a few days earlier the director-general of WHO said, "Over 8,000 children under 5 years old have been diagnosed and treated for acute malnutrition."

One of these is about "children" and the other is about "children under 5," so it's not clear if they're comparable. Nonetheless, the difference between 50,000 and 8,000 is too much for that to be the only reason. This is especially true since the WHO number is for those who "have been diagnosed and treated," which implies it covers the entire period of the war—or a substantial part of it. So 8,000 to date but 50,000 right now?

I also spent some time browsing through recent pictures of Gaza. There was suffering, there was death and destruction, there were refugees, and there were wounded. But out of dozens of photos I didn't see a single one that suggested famine levels of malnutrition.

Beyond this, there's the everpresent disagreement between Israel and the UN about how many aid trucks are getting into Gaza and how much food they contain. Both sides count "truckloads," not amounts of food, so even if they agreed it would still be unclear how much food aid is getting in. Nor, given the destruction of some of Gaza's agricultural production, is it even clear how much is required.

I don't doubt for a second that Gaza lacks all the food it needs. But the UN's overall numbers are obviously bogus. Nobody thinks 30,000 Gazans have died of malnutrition this year. Nor does the UN seem to agree with itself about the number of children facing acute malnutrition. And journalists, who have every motivation to document starvation, don't seem to be finding a lot.

So what the hell is going on? I can't make any sense out of it.

Sea lions mesmerize me. This one was swimming loops in its pool, and it's hard to imagine anything more aerodynamic when they pull in their front flippers and glide underwater before surfacing. I could watch all day.

NOTE: Yes, hydrodynamic is the proper term. But outside of a fluid dynamics class who's ever heard of that?

The Washington Post reports that Iran is expanding uranium enrichment at its Fordow nuclear facility:

Fordow had ceased making enriched uranium entirely under the terms of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. Iran resumed making the nuclear fuel there shortly after the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018.

Is anyone ever going to hold Trump to account over this? Trump canceled the nuclear deal for no better reason than his juvenile desire to undo anything that Obama had put in place. The result was a resumption of Iran's uranium processing and its probable ability to build a nuclear weapon in a few months.

The danger here is more proximate than a lot of people realize. Think about the array of forces at work. What happens if Israel is really and truly faced with an existential crisis involving, say, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah all striking at once? If Israel were genuinely on the verge of losing, they'd hit back with nuclear weapons. And if they did that, Iran would probably retaliate.

I don't think this is likely. But it's certainly possible, and it's one reason that Hamas and its allies—both in Gaza and the West—are playing a stupid and dangerous game. It doesn't matter if they like it or not. It doesn't matter if they believe Israel is running an apartheid state. It doesn't matter if they have a good moral case or if the world is on their side. None of that matters. They know they can't win. Period. Even if they somehow put together the conventional forces needed to overrun Israel, they seem to have memory holed the fact that their enemy is a nuclear power. So all they can do is play ridiculous games based on hurting Israel but never hurting it quite enough to provoke a nuclear response. Victory is literally impossible.

Retail sales were up slightly in May, but the trend is very definitely down over the past couple of years:

Retail sales per capita have declined 5% since the start of 2022. But here's more context:

So what's really going on? Are shoppers running out of money and buying less? Or simply reverting to their pre-pandemic habits? You can make a case for either one. This is why the economy is so hard to judge right now. The pandemic screwed up everything.

As part of an angry response to a New York Times explainer on getting aid to Gaza, Alec Karakatsanis says this:

For example, "humanitarian aid" pier in Gaza wasn't a cynical fraud to cover for genocide (a PR ploy by U.S. to keep sending weapons that was then itself used in one of Israel's great massacres) but a "creative solution."

I wonder how many people believe this? It's as insane as anything on the MAGA right. It's obviously true that the Biden administration is an accessory in the Gaza war, but it's just as obviously true that Biden himself is sincere in wanting to get aid into Gaza. The floating pier may have been a bit of a Hail Mary, but there was nothing cynical about it. Quite the opposite: the pier has cost upwards of half a billion dollars and has highlighted the fact that Israel is blocking land routes. That's why the pier was built.

It is plainly the case that Biden—along with nearly all of Congress—prioritizes the destruction of Hamas above food aid to Gaza. Biden has pressed Israel to do better on aid but he hasn't threatened serious consequences if they don't comply. Nevertheless, that's quite a different thing than providing "cover for genocide," which could have been carried out more easily by the simple expedient of doing nothing.

And while we're on the subject: when are we going to stop with the genocide nonsense? Based on high-end estimates, Israel has killed about 1.5% of Gaza's population. It should be possible to keep two things in your head at once about this: (a) it's horrific, (b) it's not genocide. To keep pretending otherwise is revoltingly contemptuous of true genocide.