The life of Rep. Katie Porter: How a self-proclaimed 'minivan-driving mom' is holding Wall Street and Facebook to the fire

James Pasley,James Pasley

Oct 25, 2019, 04:12 IST

The life of Rep. Katie Porter: How a self-proclaimed 'minivan-driving mom' is holding Wall Street and Facebook to the fire

Katie Porter is the Democratic representative for Orange County, California.
After growing up on a farm in Iowa, she went to Yale and Harvard, and decided she would pursue teaching and bankruptcy law after taking a class from former law professor Elizabeth Warren.
Until Donald Trump became president, she had never considered running for office.
Since she was elected in the 2018 midterms, she's shown how effective she can be with her no-nonsense questioning of bank chief executives, elected officials, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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Democrat Rep. Katie Porter is a fighter.

The professor-turned-congresswoman isn't a typical politician. She's a minivan-driving mother of three, inspired by consumer protections, housing fairness, and women's rights.

She's a bankruptcy expert and law professor, who never thought she'd run for office. But the night President Donald Trump was elected, she changed her mind.

And while it was no easy victory, in a county that had never been won by a Democrat, she had the backing of two powerful Democrats - Elizabeth Warren, her former teacher, and Kamala Harris, her former boss.

Since entering Congress, Porter's been using skills she picked up from her years as a professor and researcher to hold some of the most powerful people in the country to account. American Banker called her the "fiercest disruptor in Congress" since Warren.

Here's a look at Porter's life so far, in photos.

Katie Moore Porter was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1974. When she was two, her family moved to a farm in the southern part of the state. Her family lived through a farming crisis in the 1980s, when commodity prices plunged. She saw bankruptcies and reeling communities that never fully recovered. It was the worst depression in the Midwest, since the Great Depression.

For the last two years of high school, she ended up at Phillips Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, which she said was a "huge culture shock."

After high school, Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University, instead attending Yale University, where she majored in American Studies. But even then the focus on her studies was understanding economic hardships. Her thesis was called "The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community."

In 1997, after graduating from Yale, she traveled the world for six months and taught English to eighth graders in Hong Kong. She was 22.

She returned to the US and studied law at Harvard University. Porter had an "inkling" she might want to be a teacher. But during those years she didn't know what sort of law she wanted to do, even after working for a US attorney one summer, and for several firms in another. While she was at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz gave her a B, and she's still bitter about it.

In 2000, in her third year of law school, Porter had a pivotal moment when she read an article in Time magazine about bankruptcy legislation. The article quoted Elizabeth Warren, who said the law would be a "death by a thousand paper cuts." She thought Warren "sounded interesting," so she dropped tax law and took her 8 a.m. bankruptcy class instead. It took one class for Porter to realize the subject was for her.

But she wasn't a perfect student right away. Early on in the semester, Warren asked Porter a question, which Porter failed to answer. After class she sought Warren out. Warren expected Porter to plead with her to not ask her anymore questions, as other students had in the past. But Porter didn't. "I didn't give a great answer today," she said, adding, "So please call on me again."

After graduating magna cum laude in 2001, Porter got a job as a project director at a collaboration between several universities, called the Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Her role was to study and document bankruptcy's causes and outcomes. She flew around the country and gathered data, which Warren would later use to write about bankruptcies.

In 2005, she got a job at Iowa College of Law teaching bankruptcy and commercial law. In the first bankruptcy class she taught each semester, she gave a version of the first class Warren taught her. Warren has been a big part of her life, and it's no coincidence that Porter's daughter is named Elizabeth.

In 2006, a year into her job, she started looking into mortgage fraud. Porter wanted to know if banks were following the law, so she and a colleague studied 1,733 bankruptcy cases across 24 states. What they found was "systematic fraud," she told Mother Jones.

Years later, when she was running for Congress, she told The Sacramento Bee that she was one of the first people to "sound the alarm" about the Wall Street housing market crisis. "It was tough to get people to listen when I started that, but when the housing market crashed, everyone kind of took notice and realized the banks had been engaging in widespread fraud," she said.

In 2011, Porter was hired as a professor at the University of California Irvine. She taught business and consumer law and bankruptcy.

Kamala Harris, who was then California's attorney general, appointed Porter as a watchdog to oversee how banks distributed a $25 billion mortgage settlement. She performed the role from 2012 to 2014, and continued teaching law at the same time.

Through that work, Porter saw firsthand the damage FHA loans had done to families. "We were still trying to help some families save their homes, but to be frank, by 2013, 2014, especially 2014, a lot of the damage was done," she told The New Republic.

Her life changed the day Trump became president. Before that she had never considered a career in politics. After he won, she thought to herself she'd wait another four years for someone like Warren or Harris to take Trump on. Then she could work for them, and make a difference.

But her boyfriend wasn't having it. He asked why she had to wait for someone else, before she could make a difference. She realized he was right. And at that point she started to Google her potential competitor.

In early 2017, Porter announced she was running for Congress in Orange County. "When I launched my campaign, I set out to win," she told Elle. "I knew it would be a tough race, but as a consumer protection advocate, I'd taken on tough things before, like standing up to the big banks and calling them out for cheating people."

Her main Democrat competitor was Dave Min, another Harvard law graduate who also taught at the University of California, after Porter had recruited him. Things didn't get any easier for Porter when Min won the Democrat Party's endorsement by one vote.

During her run for congress, several insiders thought Min was spreading rumors that Porter was not up to the job, because of her divorce with her abusive ex-husband.

And even without the Democratic endorsement, "the most boring person in America" won. It was one of two improbable victories. She was also the first Democrat to ever win the district since it was created in 1983.

On her 45th birthday, she was sworn in as California's 45th district's US Representative. The "minivan driving" mother swore to serve her country beside her two sons and daughter.

She told Elle that what she brings to Congress is the understanding and perspective of a single mother of three, with kids in public schools. She knows how it feels "to be of a middle class family trying to save for retirement, thinking about paying for college."

And she's hit the ground running. The New Republic described her approach as "the languid menace of a coiled python." Using her allotted five minutes of speaking time, she's already called out heads of banks and the government, including the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Equifax, and Wells Fargo.

Her style is professorial — she often uses whiteboards and textbooks to get her point across. She's also very good at breaking down complex financial concepts and connecting the dots.

In March, she used her own law text book, "Modern Consumer Law," to quiz Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Kathy Kraninger. She asked her to do some math and when Kraninger couldn't, she said it highlighted the fact that calculations on loans can be difficult. She offered to send Kraninger a copy of her book, too.

In March, she grilled then-Wells Fargo chief executive Tim Sloan at a financial committee. She asked why the public should trust his company, when his lawyers were saying a rebranding campaign was "hyperbolic marketing", and he was telling Congress to trust him. Two weeks later Sloan was out of a job.

In May, Housing Secretary Ben Carson took the brunt of it as she asked him about REOs, a term used in real estate, which he confused for Oreo cookies. She told The New Republic it was like a student in one of her law classes "who just cannot get it."

She wasn't impressed when he later laughed it off by sending her a note and a packet of the cookies. She said he could eat all the Oreos he wanted, but then he needed to learn his material, because she needed answers.

On June 17, she announced her support for Trump's impeachment. She was the first Democrat in a formerly Republican area to do so.

In October, Porter held Mark Zuckerberg to the fire. She asked him whether he'd be willing to spend an hour a day for the next year as a Facebook content monitor, watching graphic videos of murders and stabbings, and only have access to the same benefits that his employees get. He tried to answer in a roundabout way, and finally she answered for him: "Okay, then you're saying you're not willing to do it."

It's too early to know whether Porter will get reelected if she runs again. But she'll definitely have competition. By April, eight Republicans had already launched campaigns to take the Orange County seat back from her. But if she keeps up her measured and probing questions, which she thinks "the American people would want," she'll not be unseated easily.

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