Trump says ‘sleazebags’ challenged his tariffs in court. The top plaintiff is a family-owned toy company
As It Happens6:30A family-owned educational toy company is behind the U.S. Supreme Court tariffs case
Elana Woldenberg Ruffman says she’s not bothered that U.S. President Trump called her and her fellow plaintiffs “sleazebags” for challenging his tariffs all the way to her country’s Supreme Court and winning.
Ruffman is the vice-president of marketing at Learning Resources. The family-owned, Illinois-based educational toy company was the lead plaintiff in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the case that struck down Trump’s sweeping global tariffs on Friday.
In a 6-3 decision, the judges ruled it was illegal for Trump to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act [IEEPA] to impose tariffs unilaterally without the approval of Congress.
The decision drew the president’s ire. He called the decision “unpatriotic,” and lambasted the concurring Supreme Court judges as “disloyal to our nation” and accused them, without evidence, of being “swayed by foreign interests.”
He had equally harsh words for the plaintiffs, which included a mish-mash of U.S. companies that argued the tariffs threatened to put them out of business.
“I know the people that brought the lawsuit and, you know, they’re sleazebags, major sleazebags,” he said. “I know them, and they’re foreign country-centric.”
Ruffman spoke to As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal after the ruling came down. Here is part of their conversation.
This is a serious topic with big implications, obviously, but I wonder, for you, is this the kind of moment where you’re popping champagne [and] hugging each other as you get this news?
Oh gosh. You know, it’s very exciting and gratifying.
We brought this lawsuit in April because we believed that the tariffs implemented under IEEPA were illegal, and it’s very humbling to see that the Supreme Court agreed with us and that they used many of our arguments that we brought forward in our case.
Did you ever imagine a time that your family business would end up having such an impact at the Supreme Court of the United States and on global trade policy?
Oh, absolutely not. The implications of this lawsuit and the reach of it are just mind-boggling and astounding.
The origins of this law go all the way back to [U.S. founding father] James Madison and the Boston Tea Party. This is a taxation-without-representation issue. And the Constitution of the United States was written specifically to make sure that taxes could not be passed on to the American people without their specific representatives having the ability to vote on it.
So as we kind of digested this, and we thought through the implications of this case, it was just really incredible.
As you know, the U.S. president had a different reaction than you and your family have had to this development. … How do you respond to words like that and language like that?
The reason that we brought this lawsuit was not political. It was to protect the employees who work for us.
Our decision making for this was really simple. It was do something or face death. And, you know, our family business has been around for 110 years and we weren’t willing to accept death as an option.
Does it matter to you, or bother you at this stage, when the president uses words like that, “sleazebags,” and is directing things your way?
Look, if I got knocked down every time somebody on the internet said something funny, then I wouldn’t be here today. We know who we are. We’re an educational company, and we make resources for kids that are used in schools and in homes. And that’s really what we want to be doing. We want to go back to making toys.
President Donald Trump, who took aim at a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down tariffs he imposed under emergency powers, says he has alternatives available to him and will move forward with a 10 per cent global tariff. CBC’s Katie Simpson looks at the top court’s ruling, Trump’s reaction and what might come next.
The U.S. president said there’ll be other avenues that they’re looking at, and already he’s announced, through an executive order, he’s going to impose a new 10 per cent global tariff. What does that mean for your company in this case? Are you going to have to take up this fight all over again?
Our company is better off if the government is passing less taxes to us, and the economy is better too. Tariffs are a regressive tax, which means that they impact low-income earners the hardest. When we have tariffs implemented on us, it makes us essentially a tax collector on behalf of the government.
We believe that our money is better spent investing back into the community, and creating jobs, and investing into new products that can go into schools and help kids who have developmental disabilities and need extra support with hands-on learning materials.
I think we’re going to have to wait and see exactly what they do. But, certainly, we believe that less tariffs and less taxes is going to be better for us.
This case, as we’ve said, was brought by an independent family business, your family’s business, not an Amazon or a Walmart or other huge companies, importers. What do you make of that?
For us, like I said, it was a pretty clear decision. You know, we have 500 employees and they rely on us every two weeks to pay their bills. And they have mortgages and they send kids to college. And this is something that we take very seriously. And so when there’s a threat to our ability to run our company, then we act.
And in this case, you know, IEEPA, the statute, does not use the word tariff, the word tax, the word duty, or any synonym therein. So we felt very confident in our position that the tariffs as implemented under IEEPA were illegal because it didn’t have any of that explicit language in it, which you’ll find in all other tariff statutes.
One thing that was not resolved in this decision today is … the potential for companies such as yours to get refunds. You said your business was projecting around $14 million in tariff payments in 2025. Is the next step for you fighting for a refund?
The Supreme Court remanded that decision down to a lower court. So there was no clear direction today as to how refunds will be handled or on what timeline. You know, we believe everybody is going to get their money back. The government took the money. They can send it right back.
link
