The Freshman Democrat Who's Making Conservatives Squirm [View all]

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California’s Katie Porter studied under Elizabeth Warren. Now she’s going viral by schooling Republicans on Capitol Hill. Her background as a law professor, a textbook author, a consumer protection attorney who studied under Warren at Harvard, and a single mother of three has helped to equip her with an even-keel approach, an incisive analytical mind, and a boundless well of patience—qualities that have served her well during her customarily rigorous preparation for congressional hearings, which often begins around midnight, when she gets home from Capitol Hill.

From her position on the House Financial Services Committee, Porter has staged neatly surgical dissections of testimony. If she senses a lack of preparation, she approaches her target with all the languid menace of a coiled python. As witnesses like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Housing Secretary Ben Carson have discovered, when Porter strikes, it leaves a mark.
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It’s also why her Link to tweet
" target="_blank">videos keep going viral; her ability to demystify technical, often esoteric financial concepts is a boon to those who understand that nitty-gritty details, all the minutiae of government work, are important, but aren’t sure how to connect the dots. It’s not all that different from what she used to do as a professor, and as a textbook author; now, she just has a much larger audience.

When she isn’t skewering witnesses before the Financial Services Committee, Porter focuses on health care and childcare legislation. As a single mother, she receives a scant $345 per month in child support from her former partner, whom she divorced in 2013. (The $5,000 limit for workers using fixed savings accounts to pay for childcare hasn’t been updated since 1986.) A survivor of domestic abuse, she is intent on improving access to psychiatrists, whom she struggled to find for her family. Years later, a provision to guarantee better care found its way into her bill on mental health parity.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155268/house-representative-katie-porter-schools-ben-carson-orea-jamie-dimon