Katie Porter and the politics of real life

[Celerity]

The California Democrat, famous for her viral confrontations, is admired by fans and resented by some ex-employees. Now she’s running for Senate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2023/09/20/katie-porter-senate/

https://archive.ph/G1ebd



I had been granted an hour with the congresswoman, which felt generous, but she was about 15 minutes late, which was understandable. The House is an insane place to work, running for Senate is an insane thing to do, and having three underage kids, and about 755,000 constituent bosses, and 19 hours of commuting every week between Washington and Orange County, Calif. — well, time is scarce for Rep. Katie Porter. When the California Democrat arrived earlier this year for our meeting at a coffee shop near her basement apartment on Capitol Hill, she enthused about the shamrock hue of her outfit, which jibed with the unusually green lapel pin of the 118th Congress.

She herself hasn’t been a great match for the House of Representatives, which she describes in her book, published in the spring, with startling honesty. “Being a single mom of young kids in Congress was not possible,” she writes of her first year in office. The job was “just too hard.” The day before the 2019 in-person deadline to file for her first reelection campaign, Porter was here in Washington, far from the Orange County Registrar of Voters, and “so tired I couldn’t see straight.” She was resigned to failure, to being a one-term congresswoman, because she couldn’t get her act together to run again. She was “seething” that the Founding Fathers had wives and servants “to do their bidding while they endlessly debated in Washington, without worry about their children getting to bed on time.”

But 3½ years later — near the beginning of her third term, a campaign for Senate and a book tour — Porter was a vision of energy and focus. The growing pains had been tough, but now she was ready to reach higher, for the upper chamber. “With Senator Feinstein ending her service, with Nancy [Pelosi] not being speaker” and “with Gavin [Newsom] on a different path, shall we say, there are big shoes to fill in California, politically,” said Porter, 49, shaking a Splenda into her coffee. “And if we don’t have a scrappy, strategic, strong messenger in that role, we will not be able to win in every part and pocket of California.”

Power is what Porter wanted when she ran for office — the power to confront cheating corporations, to make the government responsive to the people. A “durable majority” of Democrats in Congress is what Porter wants now. She’s fed up with the party’s struggle to keep its head above water. “We’re going backwards in terms of the number of Democratic women” in the Senate, she told me. “To me, equality is not electing Joni Ernst‚” the Republican senator from Iowa. “Like, that’s not helping.”

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