Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 8, 2022.
At the risk of repeating myself until the end of time, I continue to be annoyed that Kamala Harris and her allies emphasize how she “stood up to the big banks.” In reality, nobody stood up to the big banks after the 2008 financial crisis. No executive saw a prison cell for the mountain of fraud committed; their companies only got bigger, nearly all of the penalties imposed on them amounted to taking the air out of their books; homeowners saw virtually no relief (literally less than 10 percent of what was promised); and millions of families lost their homes unnecessarily and in most cases illegally. To elevate that as some kind of accountability moment is an insult to foreclosure victims.
But I want to make myself clear: Nobody stood up to the big banks. Harris was no worse than any of the other law enforcers who brought us that shameful course of events, and at least in one key area, she was actually better. Harris insisted that California have its own monitor for the National Mortgage Settlement, someone who could scrutinize banks’ compliance with the terms of consumer relief and improve it to the greatest extent possible.
That monitor, who made the very best of a bad deal, ensuring that California wound up playing host to nearly two out of every five principal reductions granted in the settlement (the most sustainable form of relief), was Katie Porter, then a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. You now know her as Rep. Katie Porter, who served three terms in Congress—and it was her experience as California monitor that really launched her career in politics. She happens to be the only person now in Congress who has actually worked for Kamala Harris, and so I tracked her down to talk about that experience.
There was a national monitor for the $25 billion settlement, North Carolina banking commissioner Joseph Smith. But other than California, no state had one. “This position was a creature of [Harris’s] will,” Porter told me. “She pushed to get something like this. The banks didn’t want it.”
When the time came to choose a monitor, Porter explained, Harris wasn’t steeped in consumer protection issues, having just become attorney general a year earlier after a career as a prosecutor in criminal cases. So she asked Elizabeth Warren, who at the time was still a Harvard law professor, for advice on who to choose for the position. Porter had been Warren’s student at Harvard Law and had co-authored a book with her. So Warren asked Porter to identify possible monitors. Porter suggested three other people, including the current director of the U.S. bankruptcy trustee program, Tara Twomey. Ultimately, though, Harris selected her.
Of the issues where Porter thought she could be most helpful, she cited affordable housing.
“One of my first questions was ‘What are my resources, what are my powers?’” Porter recalls. There really weren’t any. All the national monitor was authorized to do was to tally up the consumer relief credits to make sure that the banks in the settlement met their obligations, and Porter’s role was similarly narrow and undefined beyond that.
But that didn’t stop Porter from transforming the position into a force that could actually help homeowners. She got personally involved in individual foreclosure cases, as thousands of borrowers contacted her office. She wrote six reports that called out banks for things like pursuing foreclosures and loan modifications simultaneously, nullifying relief applications because of one missing document, and contacting borrowers with shoddy communications that lowered response rates. Porter’s efforts led to better results for California homeowners than anywhere else in the country, with a far greater percentage of sustainable principal reductions.
The only way she could have accomplished all that, Porter told me, is if her boss in the attorney general’s office, Harris, represented a credible threat to the banks. “I had to make an assessment about, will she back me, will she listen if I rat the banks out to her,” Porter said. “I have to say she did … Do I take credit for having a good staff and doing work? Sure. But it wouldn’t have worked if my bluff was hollow.”
Porter set up the monitor program as part of a clinic, using her students at UC Irvine Law School, where she taught. She told me that Harris spent a day at the clinic learning about the program. “Students got to represent their work, and it was terrific,” she said. “She made the students feel proud to work on it.” Elsewhere, Harris was involved with the monitoring work, Porter explained, even joining in on phone calls with the national monitor when there were problems to iron out.
I asked Porter about the flurry of billionaires and donors now calling on Harris to dump Lina Khan as chair of the FTC if she gets elected. “Corporate America wanting to write regulations that benefit them is a story as old as time,” she said. “Something I admire about Kamala and have tried to mimic, she’ll take a meeting with any CEO. She wants to sit down, wants to hear, wants to understand their perspective. But what I saw is someone who is not for sale.”
Porter said that she would consider working for Harris again, calling her “an amazing boss. She equipped me with everything I needed to help people. What more can you ask for?”
Of the issues where Porter thought she could be most helpful, she cited affordable housing. The way housing problems were “solved” before the financial crisis was with gimmicky no-money-down loans and other tricks that blew up spectacularly. Eliminating those was critical for consumer protection, but the affordability crisis was never really dealt with.
During her unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate, Porter released a ten-point housing plan, which focused on increasing supply through federal construction and renovation subsidies, incentives to communities to change housing rules, making government land available, fully funding rental vouchers, investing in assistance for new homebuyers, making it easier to build manufactured homes, encouraging land trusts, and cracking down on Wall Street investors. By the end of the race, the whole field was scrambling to put together their own housing platforms.
“The president talked about rent control,” Porter said, citing a policy Joe Biden proposed earlier this month to limit rental inflation on units owned by large landlords. “I don’t think that’s the way to go, but the [recognition of the] problem is right. He was seeing the problem fully, which is exciting.” She expressed interest in helping the Harris campaign with working through the policy on a substantive level.
After losing the Senate race, Porter announced she would return to teaching at UC Irvine. But there could be a lot of open positions in a hypothetical Harris administration in 2025, and former employees with experience working in government and managing programs with meaningful impact on a shoestring are hard to come by.
