Editor’s note:Ahead of the March primary, Growing Community Media is profiling the candidates running in the 7th congressional district. This week, that’s Reed Showalter.
Reed Showalter, 32, is the second youngest candidate running in Illinois’ 7th congressional district. A West Loop resident, Showalter’s entire career has been spent working in public service on federal policy as an attorney who targets big corporations.
“I see a country that has let itself fall to the very rich, the well connected, the powerful,” Showalter said of why he chose to run for Congress. “It’s an economy that is more interested in extracting things from people than providing the things they need to live. I’ve worked basically my whole life to try to stop that.”
Showalter describes himself as a “combination of a dream-bigger candidate and a know-how candidate, one of the youngest candidates in the field, and the one with the most relevant, federal experience.”
Showalter grew up in Oak Park, where his parents were small business owners. After graduating from New York University, Showalter worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Following the 2008 financial crisis, he tracked various markets to see whether they were being manipulated.
“I wanted to basically find the people that tanked the economy and go after them,” Showalter said. So he went to a derivatives exchange and targeted big agriculture companies. “Derivatives were the thing to tank the economy. And I was like, ‘When are they going to do it again, and how can I stop that?’”
Showalter said that everything we eat — from meat to the seeds that grow produce and grains — are owned by just a couple of companies that jack up prices on their goods and squeeze out small farmers.
“Fighting against that consolidation, breaking up those giant companies and making it harder for them to pass on their price hikes through the system is the only way in my mind to lower food prices,” Showalter said.
His experience at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange inspired him to attend Columbia University to study antitrust law and better understand how to prevent shady mergers and business practices.
Showalter was on Capitol Hill his last semester at law school, where he worked in Congress on the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. There, he was part of a year-plus-long investigation on companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Showalter helped develop five bills, four of which are continually introduced in legislative sessions and “seed the ground for breaking up a part of Google and [are] against Amazon for the abuse of their workers and small sellers.” The bill that passed increased funding for antitrust enforcement and made it easier for state and federal governments to work together.
“That funding bill that we passed allows us to challenge a bunch more mergers and allowed us to bring generational cases against, not just big tech companies, but big ag companies and big pharmaceutical companies.”
Showalter said one of the first things his team did after that bill passed was challenge a UnitedHealth Group merger to stop them from getting bigger and controlling more of the health insurance ecosystem.
Showalter has also worked as an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, on a counsel for economic justice work in the U.S. Justice Department, and as a senior policy advisor on the White House National Economic Council.
At the White House, Showalter helped negotiate Medicare drug prices and worked with the FTC to make EpiPens and inhalers more affordable.
He also pitched an executive order to ban the internal transfer pricing that many large health care companies practice. Showalter said something called the Medical Loss Ratio makes it illegal for a big health insurer to make more than a 15% profit.
“The reason why all the big healthcare companies have gotten so big is because, if [they] can buy the hospital and the doctor’s office and the clinic and the pharmacy, [they] can say, ‘No, that’s not profit. That’s the cost I haven’t paid,’” Showalter said. “Now you have UnitedHealth Group, which is the third largest company in the world, making basically all of its money on the siphoning of the American healthcare system.”
Showalter said that, until the corporate or for-profit ownership of hospitals is banned, the for-profit insurance industry will likely remain the primary driver of the health care system.
And he’s just as opposed to large companies involved in real estate. At the end of the Biden administration, Showalter said the Department of Justice developed a case that’s currently pending against RealPage for colluding to raise rent prices.
“If you pay rent in Chicago, you pay about $470 to $500 more a year because of this one company, regardless of where you live, because they found a way to get all of the landlords together to say, ‘We can all raise our rents by $25 and no one will leave if we all do it together.’”
Showalter said, when he was working at the White House, he pushed for a national price gouging ban.
“I got in yelling fights within the White House with other people on the Biden team like ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’” Showalter said of the price gouging ban. “That type of fight is exactly what we are going to have to win, and win quickly, because we’re going to have a chance as we build out of the ashes of this to do something awesome.”
Progressive politics
At the end of Trump’s second term, Showalter said Democrats will need to reverse many of his administration’s changes. But before then, they need to band-aid the holes he’s left in the political system.
“Whoever takes power, whoever wins this seat, is going to walk in in the middle of the Trump administration,” Showalter said. “So there’s no time to learn how the institutions work. You have no time to learn, for example, how to do a federal investigation of corrupt cabinet officials, or follow the chains of bribes and abuses of the institutions. That’s going to need to be done on day one.”
Showalter said he’s in the position to do that, since his work in Washington D.C. has allowed him to build relationships with relevant committees and their staff.
“Sometimes people forget that it’s not just can you introduce a bill, but can you get floor time for it? Can you get somebody to sign on to it? Can you get leadership to support it? Can you make sure that it gets out of committee and voted on by the full Congress?” Showalter said.
In addition to knowing how to navigate that process, Showalter said that, if elected, he’d bring new energy and ideas following Congressman Danny Davis’ 30-year career.
“Whoever’s going to be [elected] doesn’t have 30 years of seniority on the Ways and Means Committee,” as Davis does, Showalter said. “So there’s another way to do that, and that’s to build energy for bold, exciting reforms.”
To Showalter, this means investing in public works programs, building new houses and hospitals, having Medicare for all, training more nurses and doctors, and having the government make pharmaceuticals instead of big companies.
“That’s the type of investments that government is really good at driving, if you let it drive, that isn’t just the zero-sum of ‘How can I get another subsidy from a budget bill?’” Showalter said. “It’s going to take a ton of energy to do it. This job done right is a burnout job. I will not need to be term limit-ed out of it because I’m going to sprint at full speed. If I’m still fresh enough to keep running for reelection 20 years from now, I didn’t do my job.”
When it comes to representing a wide-ranging district, which covers the western suburbs and stretches to the Loop and Chicago’s South Side, Showalter said he wants to have more offices, which are opened every day of the week with staff trained to answer any question a constituent might have.
“Unless you’re willing to take these big swings, then the people who have been underserved by the system are only going to be more underserved by the system,” Showalter said. “Our country, and our government, is delivering perfectly well for what it’s designed to deliver for. It’s just delivering for the rich.”
