Former antitrust enforcer Reed Showalter is running for Congress to leverage his expertise in fighting corporate power.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-09-16-call-up-from-anti-monopoly-bench-reed-showalter-congress-illinois/



The Anti-Monopoly Summit kicked off Monday afternoon in Washington, D.C., and continues Tuesday. It’s a signature event for a movement that’s at something of a crossroads. While there have been some scattered bright spots this year, hopes that aggressive antitrust enforcement would survive the transition of power to Donald Trump have been drowned in a sea of corruption and lobbying. Worse, the movement’s most promising live possibility to rein in corporate power ended with an embarrassingly bad ruling by an Obama judge, which showed that some in our courts still cling to an outdated and inadequate conception of the law.

In Congress, several old-guard Democrats who advanced anti-monopoly policies have decided to retire, like Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), two of the 13 founding members of the House Monopoly Busters Caucus. Yet the summit is featuring three senators and seven House members. Despite competing frameworks for how to restore affordability and share prosperity in America, Democrats across the ideological spectrum continue to converge on ideas around economic populism that fit well with taking on oligarchs who mean to control our political and economic lives. And the truncated Biden years empowered a new generation, who gained experience in the enforcement agencies and now compose a strong bench of future anti-monopoly leaders.

Last year, Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-NH) made the transition from antitrust enforcement to Congress, and now Reed Showalter is attempting the same leap in Illinois. After spending the Biden administration as a legislative liaison in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, a Federal Trade Commission litigator, and a competition policy adviser at the White House National Economic Council, Showalter is announcing his campaign today for the state’s Seventh Congressional District, an open seat after the retirement of Rep. Danny Davis.

The district encompasses downtown and parts of the South and West Sides of Chicago, out to suburbs like Oak Park and Forest Park. The open seat has drawn a crowded field where Showalter is the 16th announced candidate. City Treasurer Melissa Conyears Ervin, former Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, SEIU Illinois State Council Executive Director Anthony Driver Jr., wealthy developer Jason Friedman, and current Rep. La Shawn Ford (whom Davis has endorsed) are among the more high-profile names.

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