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Rick Woldenberg’s family-run educational toy business will forever be known by its blockbuster Supreme Court case against President Trump’s tariffs.

He’s OK with that.

“I wanted my name on this lawsuit,” Woldenberg said. “I'm not embarrassed for bringing it, and I think it's an important lawsuit.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this morning in Learning Resources v. Trump, the case led by Woldenberg, and VOS Selections v. Trump, a challenge led by a wine importer.

Ahead of the blockbuster case, the small businesses’ CEOs sat down with The Gavel about the consequential moment to come.

Unlike Woldenberg, who has a law degree and entered the political fray during Trump’s first term by opposing a border adjustment tax championed by then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), VOS Selections founder Victor Schwartz has no such background.

“I didn't even know the law. All I knew was this was bad for business,” Schwartz told us.

Schwartz runs the business with his daughter. He sued after a relative connected him with their former law professor at George Mason University, Ilya Somin, who teamed up with the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian public-interest firm, to represent him and four other small businesses.

Schwartz said he was always willing to join. But initially, he had concerns when asked to be the lead plaintiff, knowing a prominent clash with the Trump administration lay ahead. Family, friends and attorneys Schwartz knew pushed him forward.

“They all said I should do it anyway, because it was just too important,” Schwartz said.

“In my heart of hearts, I realized I had to do it,” he continued. “I kind of felt it was a moral imperative. Somehow it landed on my doorstep. I could not walk away from it.”

The case hinges on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 statute authorizing the president to impose necessary economic sanctions during an emergency, can be used to justify Trump’s far-reaching levies.

Pre-argument reading: Five things to watch as the justices weigh Trump’s tariffs

Both Woldenberg and Schwartz said the policy would endanger their livelihoods.

“I felt like the future of our business was being directly threatened by this federal policy,” Woldenberg said. “And so I felt that, among the things that we could do to protect ourselves, aside from publicizing the ill effects of the tariffs, was to take action and follow up on my conviction that the tariffs were unlawful.”

Learning Resources and VOS Selections filed separate lawsuits with two different legal teams, and they both won in lower courts. But now at the Supreme Court, their challenges are consolidated, and the justices told them they could only have one advocate argue Wednesday.

They chose Neal Katyal, a high-powered Supreme Court advocate and former solicitor general under President Obama who often speaks out against the Trump administration. Katyal has argued more than 50 cases before the justices.

It’s a stacked team. Michael McConnell, a former appellate judge put on the bench by President George W. Bush, and Pratik Shah, who leads law firm Akin’s Supreme Court practice, also represent some of the businesses.

Woldenberg confirmed to us Bloomberg’s report that a coin was flipped to decide whether Katyal or Shah would take the lectern. When we asked Schwartz, he said “it looks good in the press” but doesn’t think “we would leave it to a coin flip.”

But the toymaker said his confidence in the case hardly hinged on which side of the coin landed face up.

“We're going to be successful either way, and you can't complain about the choices that we had,” Woldenberg said.

Trump on Monday called the case "one of the most important in the History of the Country,” with government lawyers describing his tariffs in court papers as the president's most significant economic agenda.

For a wine importer like VOS Selections, it's not as simple as just buying American.

“You cannot make a Chianti in Oregon,” Schwartz said.

Welcome to The Gavel, The Hill’s weekly courts newsletter from Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld. Reach out to us on X (@ByEllaLee, @ZachASchonfeld) or Signal (elee.03, zachschonfeld.48). Sign up here or in the box below:

IN FOCUS

What to call the Supreme Court’s speedy decisions?

A debate is raging among Supreme Court nerds: what to call the justices’ consequential, speedy orders that are handed down often without explanation.

Is it the emergency docket? The interim docket? Short order docket? How about shadow docket?

Even the justices can’t seem to agree.

The latter term was invented in 2015 by William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. Baude didn’t intend for it to be so pejorative.

It was before Trump’s first term, and Baude coined the phrase to refer to anytime the court does not explain its reasoning or disclose the full vote count. That covers not just emergency appeals, but also when the court declines to take up thousands of cases each year without comment.

In years since, “shadow docket” has increasingly been used by Supreme Court critics to take aim at the conservative majority.

“The catchy and sinister term ‘shadow docket’ has been used to portray the Court as having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneak and improper methods to get its way,” Justice Samuel Alito said in a 2021 speech at Notre Dame Law School.

With Trump’s administration having now filed a staggering 30 emergency applications to lift lower court injunctions, the debate over what term to use has........

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