20 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
velopment Secretary Ben Carson by quizzing him
on the foreclosure- related term real estate owned.
Carson suggested that its acronym, REO, sounded
like an Oreo cookie. (Porter threw away the Oreos
Carson sent her after the hearing, she says.)
Porter’s commitment to holding power to ac-
count has culminated in her near meteoric rise
on the Hill and—according to the Cook Political
Report—great odds at re-election in her histori-
cally red district this November. In a moment where
the nation’s President is broadcasting scientifically
disproved and potentially deadly lies in service
to a political agenda, Porter emerges as an avatar
of what fact-based politics could look like: nerdy,
data-driven and serious about improving the lives
of working-class Americans.
This year, Porter again applied her wonky ap-
proach to the Capitol as her colleagues grappled
with the deadliest pandemic in a century, combined
with the worst economy since at least 2008. During
a March 12 House Oversight and Reform Commit-
tee hearing, Porter whipped out a whiteboard to il-
lustrate what it would cost an uninsured American
to undergo corona virus diagnostics. The figure was
$1,331. “Fear of these costs [is] going to keep people
from being tested, from getting the care they need
and from keeping their communities safe,” she told
the room, which included Dr. Robert Redfield, the
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-
vention (CDC). Citing an existing law that grants
Redfield the power to make testing widely available
during a public-health emergency, she used her re-
maining moments to ask Redfield whether he would
commit to invoking it. She asked him some variant
of the same question three times, upping her gusto
with each iteration until Redfield, visibly belea-
guered, finally folded: “I think you’re an excellent
questioner,” he said. “So my answer is yes.”
Congressman Mike Levin, a fellow freshman
Democrat, jokes about her tenacity. “Fortunately,”
he says of their time together on the campaign trail,
“I never was subject to the whiteboard.”In a recent Zoom IntervIew from her Cali-
fornia kitchen, Porter answers my questions while
folding a heap of laundry for her three kids, ages 8,
12 and 14. What goes through her mind when an ex-
pert witness skirts her relentless inquiries? In the
case of the exchange with Redfield, she was irate.
She had told the CDC before the hearing that she
would be asking that exact question and that Red-
field should be prepared to answer it. “Never in all
my years as a teacher have I given the answer out in
advance, and yet he resisted,” she says. “He knew
the law, he knew what answer was the correct an-
swer, he just didn’t want to be accountable for using
the law to better Americans’ lives.”
Porter’s commitment to fighting for the little guyAbouT A decAde Ago, KAmAlA HArris cAlled
up Elizabeth Warren to ask for a tip. It was the
messy aftermath of the Great Recession, and Harris,
then California’s attorney general, needed a recom-
mendation for someone who could handle the com-
plicated job of overseeing the settlement money
that big banks had paid for creating and bursting
the infamous mortgage-backed- securities bubble.
“I said, ‘Talk to Katie Porter,’ ” Warren recalls
telling Harris. Porter, who was then a University of
California, Irvine, law professor, had been a student
of Warren’s at Harvard Law School. Warren remem-
bered her as “Fully prepared. Ready to go. Leaning
forward. All systems go.”
Harris listened. In 2012, she appointed Porter to
the role of California’s independent bank monitor,
where the professor spent about two years oversee-
ing more than $18 billion in debt and mortgage re-
lief, responding to more than 5,000 consumer com-
plaints and authoring half a dozen reports on bank
compliance. And she did it all on a shoestring. When
Porter was finally given funds to hire an assistant—
but not enough to hire another attorney—she got
creative, Warren recalls. Porter asked her assistant
to “dress up to look more like a lawyer” so the two of
them could appear formidable at meetings.
Today, as Porter’s first term as a Congresswoman
for California’s 45th District draws to a close, her
reputation for being a tough—and sometimes
theatrical—leader remains intact. In a March 2019
House Committee on Financial Services hearing,
Porter stumped Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau director Kathy Kraninger on the difference
between an interest rate and an annual percentage
rate. Unsatisfied with Kraninger’s answer, Porter
pulled out a textbook she’d authored, Modern Con-
sumer Law. “I’ll be happy to send you a copy of the
textbook that I wrote,” the Congresswoman said.
At a hearing the next month, Porter pushed
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to explain why
his employees’ wages are so low. She calculated that
a single mom working full time as a Chase bank
teller in Irvine would end up $567 in the red each
month after paying for necessities, like rent on a
one-bedroom apartment and day care. “How should
she manage this budget shortfall while she’s work-
ing full time at your bank?” she asked Dimon, who
didn’t have a solution. At yet another hearing in
May 2019, she flummoxed Housing and Urban De-
PORTER
QUICK
FACTS
Unplugged
In lieu of
listening to
podcasts,
Porter
celebrates
rare quiet
time: “If I
can get a
moment’s
silence, I am
so grateful.”35
Number
of years
Republicans
had held
Porter’s seat
before she
was elected in
2018Don’t
Think of an
Elephant!
Porter’s staff
read George
Lakoff’s book
in June for its
newly formed
book club.TheBrief TIME with ...
Armed with a whiteboard,
rising freshman
Katie Porter schools
Congress
By Abby Vesoulis