Today, the Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential rulings in recent memory. In a 6-3 decision, the court struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs, ruling that he had no legal authority to unilaterally impose them on nearly every country in the world. The stock market moved. Politicians cheered. Businesses exhaled.
And somewhere in the background, much quieter, the Epstein files keep sitting there.
These two things are not usually discussed in the same breath. But I think they should be, because they force a question worth sitting with: what does it actually mean to win something?
The case that today’s tariff ruling is the bigger deal:
It’s hard to argue with the scale. These tariffs have cost American households an estimated $1,000 to $1,300 each over the past year. They’ve contributed to inflation, hurt manufacturing, and destabilized trade relationships built over decades. The ruling reaffirms that the power to tax Americans belongs to Congress, not to one person who decides to call something a national emergency. That’s a foundational constitutional principle. Today was a genuine victory for separation of powers, and for the wallets of ordinary people who had no say in any of it.
The case that Epstein accountability is the bigger deal:
The Epstein network, if the evidence in those files reflects what many believe it does, represents the systematic sexual abuse of children by some of the most powerful people on the planet, people who used their wealth and connections to operate above the law for decades. Accountability has been partial at best. The files have trickled out slowly, names remain protected, and the public energy around the issue fades every time a new crisis arrives.
Here is where I land, and I’ll be direct about it.
Moral justice is foundational. Not as a philosophical abstraction but as the basic operating principle of a functioning society. The right not to be abused, the right not to be exploited by the powerful, is not one value among many to be weighed against economic outcomes. It is the floor everything else is built on.
Today’s ruling matters. It genuinely does. But it is a victory within a system that still allows certain people to commit crimes against children and largely escape accountability because of who they know and how much money they have. We can win the commercial argument and still be living in a society where that is true.
I’m not suggesting people who are celebrating today’s ruling are wrong or don’t care. People live real lives with real bills and real consequences from economic policy. That’s not nothing.
But I do think it’s worth asking yourself, quietly, which of these two unresolved situations would leave the deeper scar on the kind of society you actually want to live in.
The tariff ruling can be appealed, legislated around, or replaced. The damage it corrects is real but reversible.
The message sent by decades of impunity for the powerful is something different. That one goes deeper. That’s just my humble opinion.
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