Rick Woldenberg, the CEO of Learning Resources Inc., which defeated President Donald Trump’s tariffs in a D.C. federal court Thursday, said that he hopes the case spurs the president to rally around small business.
“We are gratified by today’s ruling in our favor,” Woldenberg said in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News. “The tariffs have been declared illegal as a matter of law. The tariffs greatly damaged our growing businesses and those in many other industries. I hope the Administration will use this occasion to rally around small businesses like ours that create so many jobs and add so much value in our country.”
The case was the second in as many days to be decided against the Trump tariffs, after the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York said that the president lacked the emergency power to impose the tariffs.
As Breitbart News reported last month, Woldenberg family-owned small manufacturing business, which makes educational toys, saw the tariffs as a “life-or-death” matter after their tax bill soared dramatcially.
Woldenberg proposed a 90-day pause on the implementation of the tariffs — which the administration adopted, though it excluded China, where Learning Resources had outsources some of its manufacturing.
Woldenberg sued, and won. Notably, he did not seek a nationwide injunction. The Wall Street Journal noted:
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras said the text of IEEPA, as well as historical practice, indicates that the law doesn’t encompass the power to impose the sort of sweeping levies used by Trump.
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Contreras blocked the Trump administration from collecting tariffs from two businesses who brought the case before him, Learning Resources Inc. and hand2mind Inc. which develop educational toys and products for children and manufacture most of their products in Asia.
Lawyers for the two firms had agreed not to seek a nationwide injunction, saying a more limited order would streamline the case.
Asked to explain why he did not sue for a nationwide injunction, Woldenberg explained: “The case was an emergency matter and needed to proceed as quickly as we could propel it. By seeking remedies limited to our companies, we reduced the issues the court would have to confront and resolve. We wanted to focus the case as much as possible on the legality of the tariffs.”
The White House has complained that litigants seeking nationwide injunctions, often Democrats and left-wing groups, have abused the power of individual federal courts by forum-shopping in specific locations to overturn national policies that have the broad approval of the voters and democratically elected leaders.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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