WASHINGTON — David Cicilline was late getting into antitrust, at least for him.
Antitrust was never on the agenda at the school board meetings he started attending when he was 13, or the town council meetings he got his parents to drive him to a year later. (That would be getting Italian added to the high school’s foreign language options, and then resisting oceanfront condo development in Narragansett, Rhode Island, and both campaigns he won.)
Competition policy was never a plank for the College Democrats group he started at Brown University with John F. Kennedy Jr. Cicilline didn’t take any antitrust classes at Georgetown Law, and he doesn’t remember if it was even a topic on the bar exam. Antitrust didn’t come up during his mayorship in Providence, was a nonissue when he ran for Congress, and was the last of the House Judiciary subcommittees he wanted to join, let alone lead one day. “The truth is, I didn’t know anything about antitrust,” he said.
