Patricia Murphy: Meet the mom and small business owner suing Trump over tariffs
On any other week before Mother’s Day, author and small business owner Emily Ley would probably be shuttling her three kids between carpools, leading a meeting for her company, or working on a creative project, like editing her latest cookbook…
Ley posted a message to her Instagram account explaining how the tariffs are impacting small businesses like hers. After the post went viral, Ley heard from the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan legal group in Washington, offering to represent her company in a lawsuit against the president to stop tariffs. Simplified v. Trump was filed in federal court in April…
Andrew Morris, the senior legal counsel for NCLA, said that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the final authority to impose new taxes and tariffs. By creating sweeping new tariffs with the stroke of a pen, or in Trump’s case a Truth Social post, the president bypassed Congress entirely.
“There’s a reason for these Constitutional procedures. They give people a voice,” Morris said. “And here, the starting point is the Constitution says tariffs are completely the province of Congress.”
Morris also said that while well-connected executives from Apple or Amazon or Ford can get a meeting with the White House to ask for an exemption from the tariffs, small businesses like Simplified have only their members of Congress to go to, and those representatives had no say in the tariffs.
Several other small businesses have since joined the Simplified lawsuit. If it’s successful, Morris said it would void the tariffs for all American businesses, including those struggling under the same pressures in Georgia…
May 9, 2025
Originally Published in Atlanta Journal-Constitution