16 candidates are vying for outgoing Senator Dick Durbin’s seat. Jeannie Evans is an antitrust enforcement lawyer and one of the Republicans running in next month’s U.S. Senate primary.
She was born and raised in Los Angeles County in Southern California. Evans went to Brigham Young University and earned an undergraduate degree in political science. After earning a law degree from Harvard Law School, her work as a commercial litigation attorney took her back to California.
Then, after a few years away from work life, Evans returned to being an attorney-this time for a firm in Chicago. She co-founded her own litigation firm and stayed there for a few years, before moving to another firm in Chicago, where she’s worked for almost 10 years pursuing lawsuits against the likes of Hyatt, Hilton, Temu, and TikTok. Evans recently joined the 21st show to discuss her background as well as foreign and domestic policy.
Interview Highlights
On being raised on both religious and American values
“My parents raised us in a Christian home. My parents loved the American government, the American Constitution. They taught me to love the gospel and to love the Constitution and the freedoms that we’ve been blessed with. My father actually read to me from the Federalist Papers as bedtime stories. He encouraged me to read the Democracy in America by De Tocqueville and free market economic theory. So I’m very rooted in free markets, free enterprise, freedom of speech.”
On suing companies for price fixing
“So if we have an industry with a few dominant competitors, there’s the opportunity for them. What we want is for them to compete with each other. If they compete, it helps lower prices, it helps increase innovation, it helps increase quality, but what they’re tempted to do is to agree with each other to raise prices. So if a few dominant competitors who control the market agree with each other to raise prices, that’s bad for American consumers.”
On AI and jobs
“So I think that as AI develops, there will be as some jobs are replaced, new jobs will develop. It’s just like prior technologies. There’s a lot of technology in the past that people were afraid of because they thought they would replace jobs, but they just created new jobs around them. So I’m hopeful that that will happen with AI. I do think we want to maintain the leadership of United States with AI. So we want to continue promoting scientific research and investment and maintain our leadership on the world stage with AI.”
On Trust Act
“We can amend our immigration laws to keep up with what is in, you know, the interest of our country and what people want to do with the immigration laws, but with the laws in place, it is important to enforce those laws, and I don’t think there should be situations where the state is refusing to, to be to cooperate with the federal government in those efforts. And I think for police as well, they’re trained to back each other up, and when someone calls in for assistance, to be there and answer that call, and it should apply to federal law enforcement as well as state law enforcement.”
Early voting is now underway across Illinois and primary Day is March 17.