It was early 2025 when the Liberty Justice Center, a Chicago-based constitutional law nonprofit, came looking for a small business owner willing to challenge President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs in court.
It was not a simple request. The administration had already frozen university funding, cowed some of the country’s most powerful law firms and made clear to anyone paying attention that crossing the president came with a price.
Victor Schwartz, a New York City-based wine importer, had to give it some thought. He called his family. He called lawyers he knew. He called somebody in the attorney general’s office.
He had two questions he kept coming back to: “Is this very risky? And should I do it?”
The answer to both was “yes.”
“ I just felt like I had to do it,” Schwartz said. “It was maybe the most important thing I could possibly do.”
A year later, Schwartz is among a handful of small business owners who can say they took the president all the way to the Supreme Court — and won. In a 6-3 decision and a rare rebuke to the president, the court ruled that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to levy sweeping tariffs was unconstitutional, a ruling that reverberated from Wall Street to the White House. The government collected roughly $175 billion in tariffs under that authority, according to one estimate, and businesses and importers are now hoping to get that money back.
But the victory is complicated. The court did not order any restitution, nor did it set out a refund mechanism.
The Liberty Justice Center has filed motions in both the Federal Circuit and the Court of International Trade pushing to get the refund process started, but there’s no clear timeline for when, or whether, that money actually flows back to the businesses that paid it. And, in the meantime, Trump has signed a new suite of tariffs under a different legal authority to replace the ones the court struck down.
“I mean the reality is we’re exactly in the same place,” Schwartz said, “in terms of running my business every day.”
Still, he said, a win is a win and this was a big one.
“Every journey begins with the first step or however philosophical you wanna get,” Schwartz said. “I think the first step can be the hardest.”
Tariff chaos
Schwartz founded VOS Selections nearly 40 years ago with a simple idea — find the wines and spirits that nobody else was importing, the bottles coming from family farms in places people hadn’t thought to look. Today, the company has about 20 employees and works with vineyards across 16 countries and five continents.
The business can sound romantic. Wine tastings and strolls in picturesque French vineyards. Schwartz laughs when he hears this.
“ I get up, put my tuxedo on, a fresh, clean shirt, and then we start with some breakfast champagne,” he said. “No. It’s roll up your sleeves, nuts and bolts, warehouse boxes … There’s accounts receivable, there’s inventory, there’s management headaches, regulatory headaches on top of that, you know, it’s like any business.”
Alcohol importers operate in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, he said. There’s federal licensing and state licensing, rules about who they can sell to and how they can price their products. There are also plenty of taxes to pay.
“Fine. That’s what it is. Not a problem,” Schwartz said. “That’s been a stable situation for a long time.”
But Trump complicated all of that with tariffs. VOS Selections managed during the first round in 2019. That was a more limited, targeted regime, Schwartz said, and the economy was in better shape.
When it became clear that Trump might win a second term, the wine and spirits industry started organizing. “We did not want to get caught flatfooted,” Schwartz said.
None of it prepared them for what came next. Schwartz describes it as “absolute chaos” — blanket levies that lurched up and down, were applied to countries, then removed and then reapplied, seemingly on a whim.
The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce estimated that small businesses in the New York City metro area absorbed somewhere along the lines of $4.5 billion annually in added tariff costs, according to a report released in February.
Chamber President Jessica Walker said 5,000 businesses closed when the tariffs were fully implemented in the second quarter of 2025.
“That was the first time in many years that we saw a net loss of businesses,” Walker said.
Between the tariffs and the simultaneous decline in the dollar, Schwartz said he faced close to a 30% increase in costs. He increased prices about 7% or 8% and absorbed the rest himself by cutting inventory and putting off new products and potential suppliers.
“I thought the idea of business should be expanding, but it’s been contracting,” Schwartz said.
The approach
It was early last year, over brunch with a visiting family member, when the conversation turned, as it always did, to tariffs. The visitor’s former law professor was mounting a legal challenge to the tariffs. Did Schwartz want an introduction?
By the following week he was on the phone with the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian-leaning group with its own ideological interest in limiting executive power. Shortly after that, they asked if he’d be the lead plaintiff.
Sara Albrecht, who runs the center’s 12-person operation, said the organization knew it would take some work to “find people brave enough” to take on the administration, but Schwartz made for a good plaintiff for reasons beyond just his willingness to show up.
VOS Selections imports from enough countries that the case wouldn’t lose its legal standing if the administration dropped tariffs on one country or another. Plus, his situation made the central argument almost self-explanatory. The administration has promised the tariffs would bring manufacturing back to the United States.
“How do you manufacture Spanish wine in the United States?” Albrecht asked. “You can’t.”
The case moved through the courts quickly, by legal standards, first the Court of International Trade, then the Federal Circuit, then the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear it on an expedited basis.
Schwartz attended every hearing; he was in the Supreme Court chamber for oral arguments. Sitting there, he said, he felt the weight of the importance of law.
“There’s a reason that we create spaces like this just from an architectural perspective,” he said. “It’s this very neoclassical building … the justices are up on a dais, so they’re so, they’re raised up. I mean, everything about it, it’s very serious.”
By the time the arguments ended, Schwartz said he was feeling confident. The wait for a decision, however, was hard. When a ruling finally came on Feb. 20, Schwartz was at home with his daughter, Chloe, on a Zoom call with the legal team.
As Chief Justice Roberts began reading the opinion, they all began looking at each other and parsing his words.
“What are you saying? What does this mean?” Schwartz asked “Does this mean we won?”
“I guess it does,” somebody replied.
Schwartz had a hip replacement surgery scheduled for a few weeks later. He danced anyway, bad hip and all.
The next night, he had dinner with his family and opened an old bottle of Domaine du Banneret, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape he has been importing for two generations.
‘Confusion. Mass confusion’
The Supreme Court’s ruling, while sweeping, still had its limits.
“ I think there’s a sigh of relief on the one hand,” said Walker, the Manhattan Chamber president. But more than anything it is confusion, mass confusion.”
Businesses are trying to understand whether they’re eligible for refunds, what documentation they need, and how long the process will take.
Albrecht, from the Liberty Justice Center, is trying to urge patience. The Court of International Trade, which typically handles 50 to 60 tariff cases a year, has now received more than 900, she said.
The new Section 122 tariffs, Trump’s replacement regime, are more predictable than what came before. They come with rules and procedures the administration has to follow. They’re also set to expire after 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them. But at 15% across the board, they still represent a significant burden for importers like Schwartz.
Trump has been blunt about his intentions. “I guess tariff refunds have to get litigated for the next two years,” he said at one press conference. The Liberty Justice Center has already filed additional motions pushing for a quicker resolution.
Schwartz’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the court’s decision. The media, domestic and foreign, all want to talk to him. And he has thousands of fans, all writing to thank him – more than enough to drown out any hate that’s come his way.
Chloe, his daughter, is one of them. “He rose to the occasion when so many other, more powerful people and organizations let themselves be bullied by this administration,” she said in an email.
Through all of this, Schwartz has become something of a symbol of what the overlooked can do when the powerful won’t.
Even now, Albrecht said, larger companies are staying quiet even as they line up for a refund. She asked one major bulk retailer if it might consider supporting her center’s work. The response: It didn’t meet their philanthropic priorities. She likened the business owners that joined the suit to the Founding Fathers, tradesmen and businessmen who believed in a constitutional order.
“It’s really kind of poetic that in the 250th year, we have another group of small businessmen who are standing up,” she said. “Sounds very corny, but …”
Schwartz finds that framing a little much. This win, he said, is only the end of the beginning of this fight.
“But I think we have shown that there are chinks in the armor,” he said. “The person in charge of this country is not a king and does not have absolute authority.”
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