Francis Chung/POLITICO
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) speaks on a telephone as she departs the U.S. Capitol on April 19, 2023.
Earlier this month, Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who is running for U.S. Senate in California, took the stage at a USC assembly room at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, to wild applause. The crowd consisted of what could be called “Katie Porter superfans”: mostly middle-aged women who have thrilled to her tough questioning of corporate executives and public officials, punctuated by the use of a whiteboard to illustrate her contentions. (Porter’s campaign book I Swear features interstitial segments of pithy whiteboard slogans, made to look like they were written in dry-erase marker.) “The American people, for viable reasons, don’t believe that we understand the challenges they face,” Porter told the Times’ Melanie Mason, and the well-dressed crowd, many carrying their latest book purchases in the C-SPAN tote bags handed out for free at the festival, nodded in agreement.
A week earlier, Porter was on a very different stage in the city of Orange, California, in front of roughly 400 Teamsters who were rallying in advance of contract negotiations with UPS, twelve weeks before a deadline that could lead to the largest strike in 25 years. “UPS needs to pay our workers and give us a fair fucking contract,” yelled Eric Jimenez, Local 952 secretary-treasurer and emcee of the event, before introducing the Senate hopeful.
Amid the heavily-tattooed, sunglasses-wearing crowd of younger, mostly Hispanic men, Porter settled in. “UPS made $13 billion last year, and spent $5 billion in buybacks. That’s bullshit,” she shouted. “Each of you deserves to share in the profits you create.” By the end of the short remarks, she received an enthusiastic response.
“That’s the joy of this job, talking to all kinds of different crowds,” Porter told me in an interview. “Yesterday I talked to the state conference of transit workers. One of the things I said was that we have too many politicians parking their Teslas and too few boarding the bus.”
Porter, to be clear, doesn’t take the bus. As the first single mother of young children ever in Congress, she drives a minivan, which has become her dominant iconography along with the whiteboard. Her book, which hit the New York Times bestseller list last month, is subtitled “Politics is Messier Than My Minivan,” and it is filled with details of the financial burdens placed upon anyone who wants to serve—two residences, the use of personal funds for all sorts of necessary expenses— which informs why so many rich people end up serving.
The tough-as-nails single-mom image caters to the legions of suburban parents in the Golden State. But what actually differentiates Porter from her main opponents in the California Senate race—progressive antiwar hero Rep. Barbara Lee and Trump impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff—is that she’s been able throughout her career to make progress without carrying institutional authority. Porter acknowledged that she, Lee, and Schiff would likely take the same votes, at least on the major issues. But there’s more to politics than that. “I just want to fix some shit,” Porter writes in her book. “The job of a candidate should be to make their case for what they’ll do with that power.”
When Redfield wavered, Porter interrupted. “No, not good enough. Dr. Redfield, you have the existing authority. Will you commit right now to using the authority that you have, vested in you, under law?”
Given that so much of her book recounts the dysfunctions of the House of Representatives, I began our conversation asking Porter if she’s ever seen the Senate. She replied that the Senate needed fresh voices and energy, and the situation with the current holder of the seat Porter wants is a good example.
Incumbent Dianne Feinstein’s months-long absence due to a case of shingles has paralyzed Senate Democrats from fulfilling what should be their primary role in divided government: confirming judges. The main impediment to this is the rule requiring Republicans to agree when Democrats change their roster on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blocked from that opportunity, judges without Republican support can’t pass the committee.
Porter demurred when asked whether she agreed with colleagues in the California delegation and state liberal organizations that Feinstein should simply resign. But she did say that there’s no reason for Republicans to get a veto on Democratic committee members; that’s not how the House runs things, in fact. In the pandemic, “every other workplace had to grapple with someone not being there,” Porter said. “Every business, every school, every nonprofit had to adapt. And the Senate didn’t. It fits into this larger category of things like the filibuster, operating procedures that don’t deliver for our democracy.”
In the House, Porter became known for her work in congressional hearings, dressing down everyone from former HUD Secretary Ben Carson to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. But to me, her signature moment was at a hearing in 2020, days into the pandemic, with then-Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield. Porter’s staff found a provision in the federal code (42 CFR § 71.30, to be precise) enabling the CDC to offer free diagnostic testing for infectious diseases, regardless of insurance status. To that point, CDC had not offered COVID tests for free.
When Redfield wavered, Porter interrupted. “No, not good enough. Dr. Redfield, you have the existing authority. Will you commit right now to using the authority that you have, vested in you, under law?” She pummeled Redfield until he agreed to make testing free. The hundreds of millions of COVID tests sent through the mail, one of the more quietly successful efforts of the past few years, sprung from Porter knowing the law and pressing at a hearing.
That’s a signature example of picking up unused power. Porter says in the book that the real work of Congress lies in civic education, to let the public into the policymaking process. But the Redfield incident suggests that extends to civic education for government officials, who often have no sense of their own power. Congress willingly gives up war powers authority to the executive branch. Statutes around for decades sit dormant, from the ability for the government to seize prescription drug patents if prices are too high, to the law passed thirteen years ago prohibiting banker compensation that’s tied to taking inappropriate risks, which the regulators simply never wrote.
Porter has a bipartisan bill that would claw back “unjust” compensation from bank executives whose institutions fail. But even if it passed, the regulatory system has been reluctant to punish the wealthy and powerful. It’s a rare skill for a politician to know that the press conference the day the bill passes isn’t the end of the fight.
“It’s a teaching and learning job,” Porter says of the job. “I think about it as trying to create a connection, a back and forth, an educational tension between the American people and Congress and the other branches of government.” She cited a recent hearing in the House Natural Resources Committee with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a former colleague. The Bureau of Land Management hasn’t raised the bonding requirement for oil and gas wells abandoned on public lands since 1960, while orphaned wells are deeper as the search for hydrocarbons reaches further. BLM has the power on their own to increase the bonding, but they need the push.
“There are institutional forces, lobbyists, trade associations, donors, who benefit from the dysfunction,” Porter said. “The more we can expose that the better.”
It was a thankless job with no real power, but Porter managed to turn it into something.
Being thrust into impossible tasks with seemingly no way to advance anything is pretty good experience for the Senate. Porter has been in that position on multiple occasions. In I Swear she describes her first brush with the spotlight, a Gretchen Morgenson New York Times article in 2007 about a research paper she wrote as a professor called Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims. This was one of the first works of scholarship to lay out how banks simply failed to follow the rules of the mortgage recordkeeping system, which has been in place for150 years before the Constitution was written.
When first presenting the paper, she was met with dismissal and derision, even from bankruptcy attorneys: one told her, “Wells Fargo does not make mistakes.” Yet her research, which did not default to the idea that the guys in the suits are automatically the honest ones, was foundational to the grassroots effort that did lead to a pause on all foreclosures in the country, as laid out in my book Chain of Title.
Later, when she moved from the University of Iowa to the University of California, Irvine, Porter was selected as the independent monitor for California’s portion of the National Mortgage Settlement. It was a thankless job with no real power, but she managed to turn it into something, churning out reports that changed loan modification practices, maximizing the amount California homeowners received, and badgering banks on individual cases.
One of the areas Porter wants to dig into in the Senate is the judiciary, where only the upper chamber offers advice and consent. A flurry of recent reporting has revealed epic corruption on the Supreme Court. But Porter wanted to talk about a softer set of ethical violations, and didn’t mind questioning President Biden’s approach to judges. “You see a flood of amicus briefs, all funded by the same handful of huge corporate donors,” she said. “I commend the Biden administration’s approach on thinking about a mix of public defenders and prosecutors. But having folks who have tackled corporate power is important, or defense attorneys who have tackled the power of the state.”
Porter’s background as a consumer protection attorney shows there, just as her background growing up on a farm could set her up to represent the large agricultural base in the Central Valley beyond her Orange County congressional district. (Porter had a lot to say to me about the farm bill and the low percentage of crop subsidies that go to fruits and vegetables.) The fact that she felt the pain of inflation directly, as expressed in a 2022 Politico article, also shows a novel perspective in a Congress composed more of socialites than those who must keep watch on a family budget. At the Times book festival discussion, Porter said that Congress “has an institutional problem connected to class.”
Some familiar controversies will be pored over during the campaign. At the Times event, Porter was asked about rumors of mistreatment of staff (there’s definitely an uncompromising law professor vs. student vibe in some of the passages in the book). Porter said that her staff comprised a team, “and we have the same problems other teams in a workplace have.” She also spoke candidly about her divorce—she eventually had to get a restraining order for her husband, who then alleged abuse right back—and how she regretted having to air that out in front of her kids.
It's hard to believe that effectiveness and ingenuity will be the biggest issues in the race rather than the above trivialities. But on the off-chance that they do come to the fore, Porter can legitimately point to her record of actually governing well. That’s a rare feat in our politics.
