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Of the Democrats vying to succeed Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein, Representative Katie Porter was first out of the gate. Porter, who represents an affluent and narrowly Democratic district south of Los Angeles, declared her candidacy early in January—before the 89-year-old Feinstein officially announced her retirement and before fellow California House members Adam Schiff, 62, and Barbara Lee, 76, announced their candidacies.
Porter, 49, a former law professor and a prodigious fundraiser, has won a national profile by her sharp questioning of financial executives and government officials, and for using her trademark whiteboard to make a point. Her blunt style has also provoked clashes with her party's leadership.
Despite these clashes, she has remained committed to providing Americans insight on the inner workings of Congress. She's also a newly-minted best-selling author: Her book I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan (Crown Publishing Group, April), in which she details what it's like to serve in Congress, recently made The New York Times' best seller list.
Despite Porter's popularity and viral moments, Schiff and Lee have also spent time in the spotlight and both have solid progressive credentials, and the race for the Democratic Senate nomination remains a close one. A late February poll by the University of California, Berkeley, and The Los Angeles Times gave Porter 20 percent of the likely Democratic vote, just behind Schiff, who led the first Trump impeachment trial, who got 22 percent. Lee came in third with 6 percent.
Porter spoke with Newsweek in early April, shortly before the failure of First Republic Bank, about some of the issues she intends to campaign on and that she believes will differentiate her from her opponents. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Newsweek: I want to start with one of your passions, banking oversight. With recent bank failures, the subject has been in the news lately, but it can seem pretty dry and technical for most people. How do you keep them focused on the issue?
Porter: Banking failures have terrible consequences for families, for small businesses, for communities and ultimately for our country as a global power. I've seen this firsthand in my childhood during the 1980s, during the farm crisis, growing up in Iowa.
All this talk about whether a bank is or is not "too big to fail"—when your money is in it, it's too big for you to fail. I think that part of the reason that thinking recedes in people's minds is because we want and usually do have a stable and strong banking system. I think what the Silicon Valley Bank failure reminds us, is that the stability of our banking system is directly connected to the strength of our regulation and the quality of our government's thinking. When we weaken those things, there are consequences.
I think that's what we saw with S.2155, which is the repeal of some of those Dodd-Frank rules [the 2018 legislation rolled back some regulations put in place after the 2007-2008 financial crisis—for example raising the threshold under which banks are deemed too big to fail from $50 billion to $250 billion]. The repeal of those rules increases the chances of a Silicon Valley Bank, and when a banking failure happens, it makes the failure harder and tougher. And so, I think the goal, as [Massachusetts Senator] Elizabeth Warren and others have said, is that banking should be boring. We don't want to have to think about it. You want to focus on running your business, creating jobs, saving for retirement, making sure that we can put food on the table every month.
What Silicon Valley Bank's failure is, it's a reminder that that is a direct result of policy. It's not an accident or a coincidence. Having a stable banking system is an intentional decision that we have made as policymakers in the United States, and by the way, it wasn't something we did as policymakers till after the 1930s. Before that, in American history, we had routine, every 10, 20, 15 years, bank panics, and they were terrible for the economy and for our country.
Is there anything that looks to you like the next potential banking disaster?
The cost of housing across the country, and particularly in California, is creating a lot of risk for American families. And here's what I mean. Traditionally, an affordable mortgage or affordable rent, cost about 30 percent of your income. If you're putting 50 or 60 percent of your income toward your house, that's not a flexible payment. You can't cut back a little on your mortgage. You either pay it and stay in your house, or you don't and you wind up in foreclosure. So, I think the cost of housing overall is a major change in the last 20 to 30 years for American households and how they think about saving, how they think about building wealth, how they think about stability.
In addition to banking, you also focus on Big Pharma. What would be your top priorities in terms of improving consumer protections in both areas?
I think generally one of the ways that you go about getting better policies which support consumers and workers is by working to get special interest money out of politics, refusing corporate donations, like I do. I always have. I'm the only candidate in this race who's never taken a dime of corporate PAC money, I'm one of 11 members of the House who doesn't take contributions from federal lobbyists. So that's one of the things I would do is lead by example and show that you can have the resources to win the toughest races in the country without being beholden to special interests.
Are there any Republicans you could see yourself working with in the Senate?
I've worked across the aisle with a number of different people depending on the issues. For example, when I worked on the Marshall Islands and the U.S. nuclear legacy of bombing the Marshall Islands and the contamination from that, I had a hearing with Paul Gosar who represents Arizona and an area where there has been fallout from nuclear testing there. [Texas Representative] Dan Crenshaw has been my co-lead on a bill to stop scam PACS, political fundraising that doesn't actually go to any candidates, it just goes to line the pockets of the consultants who run those organizations, often in the name of sympathetic groups like veterans or law enforcement. I would say that I've been willing to work across the aisle with virtually anybody on particular issues. I also know that I am finding consensus on the policy I'm trying to move forward on. I'm not trying to build a kind of permanent coalition—I'm not willing to compromise my values to get over the finish line.
On the banking bill that Elizabeth Warren and I just introduced, [Missouri Senator] Josh Hawley and [Indiana Senator] Mike Braun are the Republicans. We saw [Montana Senator] Steve Daines, for example, stand up on cracking down on congressional stock trading. There have been a number of Republicans who have called to pass a ban on congressional stock trading, as well as Democrats. But it hasn't gotten across the finish line because of leadership of both parties being too wedded to establishment traditions in Washington.
How would your perspective as a single mother shape your role as senator?
I think as someone who's raising tween and teen children—my daughter's 11, my sons are 14 and 17—thinking about, "What kind of opportunities is California going to offer for them for jobs?" "What is the role of automation in shaping the workplace that they'll be in?" "Do we see more competition between businesses and therefore stronger worker power, and how will that affect their lives?"
I lived through an era in which a lot of the economic policy that Reagan enacted, including things like gutting consumer protection, loosening bank regulation, refusing to enforce antitrust laws, loosening securities laws, I've lived through a lot of the consequences of that at an age where it really, really affected my own financial security and the
opportunities I see for my kids. I do think every generation and every age has different challenges. Particularly as someone who came to California and lived here and worked on the ground during the Great Recession, I think I've seen just how important it is for California to have a strong economy.
Representatives Lee and Schiff both have longer Congressional careers than you do, and each has over 30 endorsements so far, while you have fewer than 10. Is your relative lack of experience a liability?
Every campaign will roll out endorsements at different points in the campaign, and you'll see us roll out endorsements soon. But I've lived through this once before when I ran in 2017. In my primary, one of the other candidates had the endorsements of nearly every member of the California congressional delegation, of the California Democratic Party, of labor, and I beat that candidate in the primary and went on to win the general election, beating the Republican.
One of the things that I bring to the race is that I've been in Washington less time. I think that's an advantage because I think it keeps me closer to what it's like to be a Californian, wondering just what the heck is going on in Washington. Why don't they see the problems and challenges that we're facing? Why doesn't Washington work better? I think I'm more connected.
