To Understand What People Want, Katie Porter Thinks You Need to Get Off Twitter
The firebrand freshman congresswoman spoke to GEN about impeachment, the myth of electability, and working on Elizabeth Warren’s campaign
On a chilly afternoon in early January, Katie Porter was thinking about corporate America. In the narrow, stale maze of hallways belonging to Democrats of the House Oversight Committee, the freshman congresswoman from California was darting in and out of conference rooms, prepping with harried aides for a hearing about the upcoming census count.
Businesses in her district, she later told me in a cramped office belonging to committee chair Carolyn Maloney, didn’t want the Trump administration to add a question about citizenship to the survey — small but consequential evidence, Porter believes, that it’s possible to “reset the relationship between corporations and policymakers.”
Prior to her election in 2018, Porter’s presence in Washington was not a foregone conclusion. The 46-year-old, unabashedly liberal consumer-protection lawyer comes from a historically red district in Southern California that includes the uber-rich and uber-conservative Orange County. She defeated Republican incumbent Mimi Walters by only about 6,000 votes…
