Strict Scrutiny - When There Are 535

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

In March, the NYU School of Law hosted the the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network's symposium on Politics, Power, and Women’s Leadership. As a part of the event, Melissa interviewed Congresswoman Katie Porter about her experience running for office, child care as infrastructure, and, of course, her big whiteboard energy. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky

In 2015, Vladimir Putin's number one public enemy, Boris Nemtsov, was shot and killed in front of the Kremlin. He was a relentless critic of Putin, corruption, and war in Ukraine. Then he was assassinated. I'm Ben Rhodes, writer and co-host of Pod Save the World, and I'm teaming up with Boris's daughter, journalist Zhanna Nemsova, to tell his story in Crooked Media's new podcast, Another Russia.

Together, we uncover what happened to one family and an entire country and ask whether another Russia is possible. New episodes every Monday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Strict Scrutiny listeners. It's Melissa Murray. episodes every Monday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Each year, the BWLN hosts a symposium on issues relating to gender justice and gender equity. This year, our symposium, which was held on March 5th, focused on politics, power, and women's leadership. The day featured incredible panels from a wide range of women leaders from across the country. the day was certainly a keynote conversation between myself and Representative Katie Porter,

who represents California's 45th Congressional District, aka the OC, in the U.S. House of Representatives. We are delighted to share that conversation with all of you today as a very special episode brought to you by Strict Scrutiny and the BWLN. We hope you enjoy it. Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court. It's an old joke, but when a man argues against We hope you enjoy it. She said, I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our legs. I am thrilled to introduce our keynote conversation participant, and that is Congresswoman Katie Porter. Congresswoman Porter represents the 45th Congressional District in Orange County, California. And in Congress, she's a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee, and she chairs the Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee. We are so glad she's here to join us to share the ways in which she and her signature whiteboard are taking on some of the most important issues that face working Americans. Welcome to NYU, Katie. It is really great to see you here.

It's wonderful to be here with you. I miss law teaching so very, very much. I really thought that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life because it brought me so much joy. And so it's nice to be back in conversation with law students today. Well, you actually anticipated my first question. So I first want to acknowledge that you have really raised the bar for law professors everywhere. And I will note that you are actually using law professor skills when you are interrogating some of these members of Congress. But do not worry, prospective students, we are more gentle on our students than we are on those who are charged with spending public money for public

purposes. But I want to talk about the last time we met. So we were colleagues for years, but the last time I actually saw you in person was in 2017 at a hotel restaurant in San Francisco during an academic conference. And you mentioned to me that you were mulling the prospect of doing something really big, just really blowing everything up. And I thought you were going to become an associate dean or something, But you shocked the world and instead decided to challenge your incumbent congresswoman, Mimi Waters, for her seat representing Orange County. So how did you decide to put both feet in and run for office after never having any experience in political life? No, I never ran for anything, not for class president, not for deputy treasurer, nothing. I was the kind of person who thought about myself as I'll work hard, I'll be good at

what I do, and people will ask me to serve in different roles. And there was a lot of that that happened in my career for which I'm grateful. But running for office is fundamentally different. It is fundamentally about stepping forward and asking, really selling yourself in a very different way than I think I had, you know, in promoting papers that I was doing or trying to get jobs within academia. And, you know, for me, a lot of it came out of having watched Elizabeth Warren make her transition from my professor, then into kind of being more of a public intellectual and ultimately into running, working in government and then ultimately running for office. I had a much steeper move. I did it all kind of in one fell swoop. You know, my

conversation I had with Elizabeth, the week of Trump winning in November of 2016 was really an important part of how I got the confidence to do this. And I want to share with everyone today what she said to me. So Elizabeth was a wonderful mentor. And the key is not just to get a mentor. It's to use them, right? It's to go to your mentor with questions. And so I asked Elizabeth if she could talk to me.

And we sat down for breakfast. And I said, I had planned to go to DC to work in the administration when Hillary Clinton won. That had not happened. I took back all my winter clothes to Nordstrom's. And that was a really disappointed personal shopper. I mean, I literally wheeled the carry-on bag back in and returned all the tights and boots and sweaters and things that I don't need in California. And so I said to Elizabeth, well, I have three ideas for what I could do. And I told her the first one, and I can't even remember what that was. Maybe teach tax or move into a new area of academia. And she said, okay. And then I told her the second one, which is really appropriate for you to hear, Melissa. I said, well, I was

thinking that I maybe could be a law school dean. Like, I really believe in legal education. I believe in law as a tool to make society better. I think I could really love this. And she said, I'll never forget, she made this exact face. That's just a truly terrible idea. I mean, Katie, how does that one even get into the pile? Can't you screen out bad ideas? So that I really had to screw up my courage to tell Elizabeth my third idea,

which was that I would run for Congress against the incumbent Republican. And she said, that's an idea I want to hear more about. And she said two things to me, which I think are really, really important to repeat here. One is she said, I will be with you election. The incumbent Republican was up significantly, and it looked like she might pull it off. And as many people were celebrating taking back the House in 2018, I was giving a speech saying, we don't know, but we tried hard. And so I actually, you know, called Elizabeth, thanked her for her help. And she called me back a few days later. She said, I'm so proud of you. You tried so hard. You did so great.

Doesn't matter if you didn't win. You did all these important things. And I said, oh, actually, I'm winning now. And so she really was there for me the entire process. The second thing she said, which I think is really important, is she said, you will learn something every single day that you are a candidate for office. You'll see a part of your community that you didn't visit or weren't part of before. You'll hear stories about what's happening. You'll understand the economy and the

society and the culture of your community better. And you'll learn things about yourself, what you're good at, what you thought you were good at, but you actually need to improve. And that opportunity for personal growth that comes as a candidate really comes whether you win or lose. And it has been an incredibly important reason that this has been rewarding. I want to maybe insert myself into your narrative because when we had that dinner in San Francisco, I think I was the dean of a law school at the time. And I would like to think that you saw those incredible bags under my eyes and the many sleepless nights I was enduring. And you decided not to choose violence for yourself and instead take the less rigorous path of mixing it up in Congress as opposed to mixing it up with your faculty. So well played. Notice I've gotten

out of the Dean game as well, but you're doing amazing work in Congress. And one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of the work that you're doing really mirrors some of what your experience in the academy was. So if those of you aren't familiar with Congresswoman Porter's academic record, she was a scholar of bankruptcy. And this is an area in law school that has for years been dominated by corporate bankruptcy experts, people who are interested in corporate bankruptcy and restructuring. But you were not doing corporate bankruptcy. Instead, you were thinking about consumer bankruptcy and all of the different ways in which most Americans are really just one financial catastrophe away from financial

precarity and bankruptcy itself. And you actually got a lot of hostility in the academy from the corporate types about the kind of work that you were doing and the fact that you wanted to focus on ordinary average Americans as opposed to corporations. And I've noticed that in Congress, you're still fighting that fight against these corporate interests and your desire to really surface the needs of ordinary Americans. Can you say a little bit more about how we've come to the point where these larger interests have really come to dominate the way we think about politics? It's actually somewhat similar, I think, within the academy, which is that money really matters and resources really matter. And you know, Melissa, that there were academic

institutes set up by those who support changing the law to make things easier for large corporations, and they generated really an entire decade or two worth of scholars who then sat on hiring committees and became dean. And a lot of those people were business law teachers, because that's what corporations want changed is business laws. And so I think in Congress, it's somewhat the same way that we have special interest money, we have corporate lobbyists. And you know, one of the things in bankruptcy is that nobody, there is no lobbying association for people in financial trouble. It's an activity that, like divorce or family breakup or mental illness, many people experience isolation, a sense, I think wrongfully, but a sense of social shame, embarrassment, and they don't speak up about those experiences. So I think it's really, really important that as a representative, along with some amazing colleagues, like Ayanna Pressley, for example, that we're talking about some of these issues, that we're fighting for things that are really matter in people's lives. And I remember in academia, people would say to me, well,

it's so nice that your work can be understood by regular people, meaning that I had simple ideas about simple, you know, everyday people. And I just, you know, corporate bankruptcy was just a little too tricky for me. That was not true then. It's not true now. The reality is I was fighting for individual people and thinking about family and household economic stability, because in a capitalist society, that's the building block. In a democracy, that's the building block. And if families can't make ends meet, if they can't afford childcare, they can't afford college, they can't afford a roof over their head, the rest of the economic and social issues start to fray. And so I think it's really important that we center things on that. And we talk about that these issues of family economic security are not just about each individual family. It's about

our collective economy. It's about our ability to compete on a global stage for good jobs. I think it's a fantastic point. I think we have seen the truth of that point this year. American families, as Abby noted at the beginning of the symposium, really have been the safety net behind the entire American social system. We are the ones who pick up the slack. And we do it privately without a lot of public support for the kind of caregiving work that families are charged with doing. But this year, we really saw even the basic things that families have come to rely on, whether it's cobbled together child care networks on grandparent child care networks in schools, just absolutely collapse in the weight of this pandemic. Not only could families not withstand those shocks, the economy couldn't withstand those shocks. So why hasn't it become

clearer to those in Washington that if we don't support the family, if we don't stop thinking of the family as a private entity and family distress is not simply a personal failure, but a collective public failure, that we're not going to have an economy that runs and can withstand the kinds of shocks that we've experienced over the last year. No, absolutely. And I wrote in one of my law review articles, maybe the favorite line I ever wrote was private transactions have public effects, right? And we see that in so many different areas, people who purchase land, right? Private transactions, but it has massive public effects on our ability, for example, to fight climate change. And it's the exact same thing in our economy. So I think your point is really well taken about households and particularly often women, grandmothers, mothers, daughters, people being asked to take on whenever anything goes wrong, well, the women will kind of make it okay. And you actually see this in research that

my colleague did on families in bankruptcy. When families have extra money, men in a couple that's a heterosexual couple, men decide where and how to spend it. But when money is too short, that is women's work. You have to learn to live on what we have. And so there's a gender division, even of that economic work in a household. And so with the recession, with people losing their jobs, losing their health insurance, in addition to all the child care, it's predominantly women who are having to be taking on and having the task put on them to figure out how to make the ends meet, how to get people to and from school. And so we're seeing that have a huge effect on our GDP. We talk about this, when you look at who's exited the workforce, it is predominantly women, particularly lower income women and women of color. And some people have tried to suggest, well, this is an industry specific thing. Restaurants were hurt. And their stereotypical person that they conjure in their mind of a restaurant worker is a person of color, a woman of color. But the reality is, even when you control for industry, it is across the board, women have been the workers who have

been exiting the workforce. And so when we talk about, you know, ending this recession and building back better, we really have to acknowledge that supporting child care, supporting families, providing social services, making child care affordable, it's not something we do for women. It's not something we do for parents. It is something we do for our economy. So I think this means it's really, really important to have all of the different voices of our Congress, voices that are predominantly still male, make this point. And so one of the things that President Biden has done that I think is really exciting is locate support for the caregiving economy,

both the people who need to find care to be in the workforce, but also those who do the caregiving work, who are predominantly women of color, that investing in that caregiving workforce and in that care economy is part of our nation's economic infrastructure, just as much as any road or bridge. And I think that is a really important point to have being made at the very, very top by our president. So let me reflect on some history. There was a period in our history, and Sylvia alluded to this in the first panel, where support for child care was actually a Republican theme. Like Richard Nixon began to have this conversation with the American people about child care. And it all kind of fell apart because the idea of

public subsidization for child care was viewed as an assault on the family, as an effort to dismantle traditional gender roles, and to push women into the workplace against their will. Is part of that logic, the sort of idea of traditional gender stereotypes and gender roles undergirding the unwillingness to understand child care as an important aspect of economic infrastructure? I definitely think so. And I think that the structural changes in our economy have produced another force, along with ideas about what a family should look like and how the work of being a family ought to be divided inside and outside the home. On top of that, we have an economy where things like the minimum wage have not changed,

where savings, some of the basic costs, particularly for housing, for child care, for college, for health care, have skyrocketed. There's a level of economic instability created by things like the lack of long-term employment opportunities, lower rates of unionization, the gig economy. The outcome of all this is both men and women feel more economically vulnerable than in the past. And that has manifested itself sometimes, I think, in efforts to really say that a job for a woman is a job lost for a man. And we don't hear very many people talk about that. But I think so often when I hear colleagues in Washington talk about this will cost us jobs, we will lose jobs. When you push on it, you almost

always hear that frame being used in reference to industries that are very, very male dominated, like the construction industry. And so I think when we think about job loss, you know, we talk about that often in terms of loss of a man's job, industry transformation that would hurt men as opposed to women. And this recession, you know, in some of the terms of the industries that have been closed and the stresses that it's put on families have really fallen harder on women than men. And look, the facts here just don't lie. No less than McKinsey Consulting Company, which is not exactly an entity you're going to confuse with Ms. Magazine for their radical feminism. McKinsey Consulting wrote a whole report on this issue, documenting the number of women who have exited the workforce and the number of women who are seriously

considering leaving the workforce. And that's not just a short-term problem. When women go to re-enter the workforce, there are barriers to them starting back up. They will be asked, where have you been for the last year during this pandemic in a way that male applicants will not be? It has long-term implications for women's retirement security, for their ability to access health insurance, all kinds of numbers of important determinants of well-being. So can I turn the whiteboard on you for a minute? How does this feel? Yeah.

So this is a really, this is an example here of where there's a huge gap between what Congress tries to do to help people and the realities that people are dealing with. So Congress has proposed to expand the child tax credit and to make it bigger. But even if we do that and you are eligible for that tax credit, which I want to talk about in a minute, it's not even going to come close to meeting the cost of child care. So as Melissa shows you, infant child care, the typical cost in places like California, $16,000, $17,000. Annual child care for an older child, a four or five-year-old, $12,000. So the tax credit doesn't get you all the way there. And you can see this, by the way, also in the bill we have that lets people set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for child care. And I was fortunate to work for employers and universities that let me set aside those pre-tax dollars. We call them

flexible spending accounts or dependent care accounts. And I would always say the maximum you can put aside is $5,000. And I thought, oh, child care is going to cost me more than that. And then I had a second kid and I was like, woo woo, I can put aside $10,000. No, you can have seven children and you still can only set aside $5,000. And so I always used to think, who the heck thinks that this is how much child care costs? And I got my answer when I got to Congress and began immediately working on raising that number. Ronald Reagan, which is back to your point about Republicans actually in the late 70s and early 80s actually being pretty supportive of making child care affordable. That number, that $5,000 was set under Ronald Reagan in 1986

and has never been changed. So I have a bill called the Family Savings for Kids and Seniors Act that would raise that number to about $11,000, which is pretty close to the average cost of child care of $12,000. And then we inflation adjust it going forward. But you're absolutely right. Even as we're championing this expanded child tax credit, which is a different program, and we would give extra money, $3,000 extra for children and $3,600 for small children, it's still not coming close to providing the full level of financial help that parents need. And I think there's just only so much we're going to be able to do at the household level. Some of this we need to make structural changes to our economy. It's the

investment in pre-K. It's things like that that are really going to make this possible. So can I just tell you, this made me feel incredibly powerful, like just holding up this whiteboard. Is this how you feel every time you go to a hearing with your whiteboard? Because I'm getting a real charge out of this. Well, sometimes I worry because I worry I'm going to misspell something or like my handwriting will be sloppy. But, you know, I think I use the whiteboard a lot in the classroom. And, you know, I'd ask a student a question, and sometimes they wouldn't understand. Or there's the dreaded, you've given this big windup to this important question,

and the student says, could you repeat the question? And then you often, I would turn to the whiteboard to try to make it easier to follow along with the question. And that's really what I try to do when I use things like the whiteboard in Congress is I don't want the witnesses to filibuster. I want them to confront the same hard questions that the American people are confronting. How do I live on the salary that this corporation's paying me? How do I possibly go to get testing for coronavirus when the cost of that test, if not covered, could bankrupt me? These are really how the American family is experiencing these questions on a day-to-day basis.

And the whiteboard is really a tool to make sure that the witness has to confront in the most vivid way possible what American families are having to deal with every day. You've turned the whiteboard into a hammer of justice for American families. So I mean, you've completely transformed it. And you've made the whole idea of big whiteboard energy a common part of the American lexicon. So thank you for that. But can we talk about just some of the changes that you've seen over your two cycles in Congress. Like you came in, in 2018, you were reelected in 2020. 2018 saw record number of women in the House elected to membership in the House. 2020 saw even more, and again, more people of color. How has that changed the dynamic in the Capitol and specifically in your chamber?

It's made a huge, huge difference in terms of what issues get talked about and what issues get priority. Because we've not just increased the number of women or the number of people of color, but we've increased the representation of those women. So we have women now who have been nurses. We have women who have been single moms or are single moms like me. We have lesbian mothers. We have people whose siblings and children are non-binary or non-gender conforming. And so we read legislation and think about issues from a different perspective. And this really happened to me personally,

you know, listening to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who's an older white man, describe, well, you know, you get this much of a survival check if you're filing single, and you get twice, you know, you get this much if you file married couple. And I remember listening to this and thinking, but what about me about me I file like most single parents and many grandparents who are caring for people as a head of household what about what about me am I just not like we're a huge category there are millions and millions of us and so one of the things I've learned is I started to dig into how do we treat single parents in the tax code how do we think about the help that we give to

single parents? And with my colleague, Ayanna Pressley, we've identified some moments in which single parents are really penalized, even as we're trying to enact policy to help children. And predominantly, the chances of a child in the single parent household, there are lower outcomes, worse outcomes across any number of metrics. So even when we look at the single parent household, there are lower outcomes, worse outcomes across any number of metrics. So even when we look at the child tax credit, what we found is a lower threshold for eligibility, more difficulty getting the eligibility for that child tax credit for single parents than for married couples. And this makes no sense. The credit is about the child. It's not about their parents. And a child in a single family home deserves the same nutritious

food, access to quality child care, adequate housing as a child who's growing up in a couple that's married. And in fact, if we were trying to address the equity gap, we would give single parents even more, not less. And so we've been working on ending the single parent penalty and pushing back. And I intend to do a big look at how the tax code treats heads of household and single parents generally, because not only is there a gender issue here, most single parents are women. There's a huge racial issue here. 66% of single parents are Black. And this discriminatory treatment towards single parents has both its roots in gender inequities, but also in structural racism. Well, not only that, too, it goes to the point of marriage and the marital family being the way we cobble together and patch up our tattered social

safety net. By penalizing single parents, you actually provide strong incentives to get into some kind of relationship, a married relationship. So again, there's a channeling effect that tax law has. And so we talk about this in family law all the time. There are lots of hidden ways in which laws that don't seem like family laws really do have a role in regulating the family. But again, that's something that could only happen in Congress because you have a more diverse membership, people like you and Representative Presley who have different experiences. I am reminded about the experiences that you all had on January 6th when there was the raid on the Capitol. And as

you've spoken about, you were the one who was able to take in some of your colleagues, including Representative Ocasio-Cortez, and shield them from the mob that was basically besieging the Capitol on that day. What is it like to be someone who is clearly visible as outside of the norm for congressional membership in a moment like that? Well, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that I saw and experienced very clearly that day when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we were walking down the hallway, I passed her. She, you know, she gave me a kind of a little quick wave and not a minute later knocked on the door and, you know, said, and said, could I come in?

To which I said, of course. She was terrified. There had been a bomb threat in her building. They had evacuated her in a very scary way, pounding on the door, yelling for her, not identifying themselves as police. And so we were able to have her shelter in our office with us.

But part of that is because I'm white and they are not going to come looking for me in the same way that they're going to come looking for her, plain and simple. And that, you know, that actually was a really palpable demonstration of the importance of allyship, of the importance of being there for your colleagues. And so she had a very different experience that day. Grace Meng had a very different experience that day than some of my colleagues who are white, who are male, who served in the military, who are bigger physically. They had a very different experience. And I think we should not be dismissive

of how different people experience that day in different ways, because it happened not just to those of us day in different ways, because it happened not just to those of us who were elected officials. It also happened to the Capitol Police who were protecting us that day, that Capitol Police officers who were themselves women or people of color had a different experience that day because there was definitely that overtone to the entire day. So I'm grateful that Alex was able to hang out with us, that she felt safe doing so in our office. But it was, you know, it was terrible to experience that and the uncertainty

of not knowing kind of what was happening. And we could see the outside of the Capitol because the TV cameras could, but we didn't know where they were within the building. And that was really, really scary. So we literally were quiet in dark rooms, silent for five or six hours, trying not to attract attention. So our best strategy to protect ourselves was to hide. But the fact that, you know, it's difficult for Alexandria to hide because she is such a trailblazer, because she is so recognizable for the fact that she's a unique and new voice in Congress, actually made her more physically vulnerable in that moment. Well, the point that you made about being forced for your safety to be silent for five to six hours, you might understand that as part of the goal in a larger sense. I mean,

one way to understand the siege on the Capitol on January 6th, which I don't think many people have talked about it, it's mostly discussed as a failure of disinformation or the rise of fake news. But you could also be seen as profound anxiety about the changing character of American leadership. And this is a group of people who are walking through the Capitol calling Nancy Pelosi a bitch, looking for her, looking for members of the squad and the treatment that some of the women of color who are members of Congress have experienced over the last four years is emblematic of all of this. Is there in the country, do you think,

a discomfort with the idea of women not simply being tokens, but actually being prominent leaders on the national stage? I do think so. And I think that, you know, we've seen this in other industries and in other places. We still see it. My sister's a physician. When she enters a hospital room or the exam room, people say, I've already seen the nurse. They just instantly make that understanding of who she is because she's a woman. And so I think there is a level of

discomfort with it, but it's really about that change that I think we've made in the last two years from having women who are elected to having women who are elected who are leading and are being really, really powerful voices. So, you know, the two traditional paths for women to go into politics were either that your husband died in office or that your father or your husband had served in politics. And so even with Speaker Pelosi, who's such a trailblazing figure in many ways. Her father was the mayor of Baltimore. She grew up steeped in politics, and that was her path of entry. And she entered politics after her children were in college, which is sort of the moment that a lot of people were able to do it. So to now have so many mothers of young children, to have people who haven't yet

have children, to have children while they're serving, like Senator Duckworth and others. I think it really does create this diversity in which we don't just have women. We have women who better reflect, and there's a lot more to be done, but they better reflect the actual women's lived experiences. So a new kind of trail to be blazed and new trailblazers. Absolutely. And you know, one of the things that I thought about a lot with that term trailblazer is it's not about the fact that you get to where you're going, but it's that you change the path for those who follow. You're literally blazing the trail, making space, making it safer, making it easier for people to come in your footsteps. And so I think that's different in sort of as a mindset than I'm going to get there. And I think we really see in a lot of the sisterhood that we have in Congress now, not women who just have gotten

there, but women who are thinking very intentionally, including with allies, including men, about how do we make it possible for including with allies, including, you know, men, about how do we make it possible for others to get here. And for me, that's really what the Help America Run Act is about. Can you say a little bit about the Help America Run Act? Yeah, I mean, when I went to run for Congress, and I had been a working mother, you know, I'd shown up at lots of law schools as a newly hired faculty member, pregnant'm pregnant. Hi, I'm here to teach. And by the way, I request parental leave the very next semester. But when I went to run for Congress, it was really, I think, much more so than in my other professional life. People feel emboldened

to really ask about your family as part of your qualification to do the job. So less as will your family be a hindrance to you and more about like you have to have the right kind of family to even have the skillset to do this job. The most common question I got asked while I was running for Congress was not, why do I support Medicare for all? Or how will I beat this Republican and flip this historically Republican area?

It was, what will happen to your children if you win? And I want to say that again, what will happen to your children if you win? And the wording of that really sat with me. This idea that running for Congress was something that I was doing to my children, and that this was a burden that I was putting on them, and that their very well-being might be harmed if, in fact, I was successful at this career goal. And so I started to joke back with people, and I would say, you know, well, I guess they'll just implode. I mean, what do you mean what will happen to them? Like, they will continue to be my children. I will continue to be my children.

I will continue to be their mother. And so for a while, I really resented the question. And then after a while, I started noticing who it was who was asking me that. It wasn't older men. It wasn't kids. It was a lot of working moms who were asking that question. And I started to hear it in a different way, which is, it is so hard for me as a working mom with a job that doesn't require cross-country travel, with a job that doesn't require weekend hours, with a job that doesn't come with some of the stresses and strains of being a congressperson. And I'm struggling. They actually wanted tips. They actually wanted help. This is so hard to do. And that helped me think about it in a different way. And one of the real challenges of running for Congress is it's very, very hard for low-income people. It's very hard

to have to leave your job if you stay in your job. The ability to keep working full-time and run a campaign, a competitive campaign, it's extraordinarily difficult. So you see that most people who run for Congress are people of significant wealth. They're people who are able to go without an income for six months or a year or a year and a half. And then on top of that, for parents, there's the cost of additional child care. And it's not just that you need nine through five care, it's that you need care on the weekends, you need care on the evenings, you need care, there's a really intense amounts of care as the campaign gets closer. And so what the Help America

Run Act would do is make it possible for candidates to use campaign funds to cover the costs of child care or senior care if they're caring for an adult dependent while they are campaigning. And to be clear, the FEC has been perfectly clear for decades that you can cover the cost of wine and cheese for your donors. And you can cover the cost of the travel to get to the event. You can even cover the cost of the haircut while you're on the campaign trail. But yet, child care, the initial response was that child care was a personal choice. As if haircuts are not a personal choice. Don't serve wine and cheese, serve water. And so this idea that this was something that people chose to do, and therefore you should have to, you know, individually rather

than collectively bear the consequence of this choice, I think reflects a lot of the discussion that we were having earlier. The other part of the Help America Run Act that I think is really, really important is that it would let candidates use campaign funds to cover the cost of health insurance. And I was fortunate that I stayed on my university health insurance while I ran for Congress. But when I got to Congress, I ran headlong into this problem. I went to my congressional benefit orientation and they said, well, your health insurance, you'll come through the Affordable Care Act. You have to go on to the exchange.

These are the plans you can choose from. And they said, and it will start February 1st. But you get sworn into Congress on January 3rd. And so I said, well, what about that? What about January? Like, what if something happens and I need health insurance in January? What if my kids need health insurance in January? And she said, well, most people just go on their spouse's insurance.

I was like, well, I don't have a spouse. So what would you suggest for me? Right. And the option given was to get COBRA, which is, we all know, very, I don't have a spouse. So what would you suggest for me? Right. And the option given was to get COBRA, which is, we all know, very, very expensive. And so a lot of people in their run for Congress, Sheree Davids was in this situation, they go without health insurance. And so I think that it's really important that we recognize that if we want candidates who are diverse, if we want candidates who understand what it's like to be a regular working person, that we make it possible for regular working people to run.

That is the test. Do you actually want the democratic process to be available to everyone? Absolutely. And I think that is, by the way, we have not universally answered that yes. And yesterday, and I guess the day before yesterday, up late voting on the For the People Act, which would do a lot to try to address the challenges of campaigning and fundraising that candidates face so that we can help more diverse people step up and run for Congress and participate in public life. So we have a bunch of terrific questions here.

So one is from a prospective student. Welcome to NYU. We hope we see you here next year. And the prospective student would like to know, for those who are thinking about running for office, why go to law school? Is it worth the debt, the time, et cetera, when you don't need a law degree technically to run? Great question. I am a huge fan of my law degree. I absolutely think it is critical to how I analyze problems, to the confidence that I have in engaging them publicly. I mean, one of my favorite moment, my favorite moment of this year maybe, was when I was questioning Steve Mnuchin and I was asking him about his interpretation of a part of the Federal Reserve

Act and of the CARES Act, in which he was claiming that they had to give the money back, but that money could not be spent to help people. And I was pushing him on whether he was reading the statute correctly. And I asked him, I said, well, you know, Secretary Mnuchin, are you a lawyer? And he's so lucky that I didn't hear him because what he said was, well, are you a lawyer? Well, first off, yes. And second, I asked the questions, you answer them. And so he's so lucky I didn't hear him say that. But the reality is that legal education does train you to think about problems and analyze problems in a particular way. Now, there's a big gap between law school and law practice, between law school and the gap between political scientists and

elected officials is not a gap. It's like a canyon. So there is this nature, but I do think that the intellectual rigor of it, the ability to read quickly, to digest complex things, to think about how to break things down into component parts, to proceed logically in solving and presenting a problem, those are all skills that I use every single day in Congress. Radhika Kachula, who is also a prospective student, welcome Radhika, we hope you see you here, also wants to know about law school and she's especially interested in the question of student debt and she would like to know if you have thoughts about the incredible debt that students will incur as they try to pursue higher education. Student debt is a tremendous drain on our entire

economy and like we were talking about, we shouldn't just address the cost of child care to help parents. We shouldn't just address the problem of student loan debt to help borrowers. Student loan debt is reshaping our economy and our society in fundamental ways, delaying and changing decisions to have children, to get married, to start businesses. And when you reduce student loan debt, a lot of those decisions and the calculuses that people are having to make then change. So I think we have two sets of problems. And it's sort of interesting to me in Congress that we really mostly are thinking about only one of the two. The one problem is the $1.9 trillion or $2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.

What do we do about that? Right? Do we forgive it? How do we forgive it? Do we cancel it? And do we create limits and means test? Or do we cancel it kind of universally under this idea that education is a right and that pursuing education shouldn't leave anybody in financial distress?

But the other, and we talk about that a lot, there is now, in part, I think largely to folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others, there is a conversation about that. This conversation that we don't have very much that I'm really interested in is how do we bring down the costs of higher education longer term?

Because if we forgive all that debt, but then we do not think about how to prevent the next group of students and the next batch of the next generation from having it, we're not really solving this problem. We're just eliminating it for a certain group of people. And actually, it's sort of interesting, you mentioned I used to study bankruptcy law. There's actually a history of this in our country, of these debt jubilees, in which we sort of all throw our hands up and say, okay, nobody owes anything. But then what would happen five or 10 years later is you'd have people who were indebted again and again. And it's not random

who carries those debts. They're predominantly carried by lower income people. They're predominantly carried by people from first generation families, from people of color, from immigrants. And that really does shape who's entering these professions. And the ultimate outcome is that we will be less good at doing any of these things if we don't have diverse minds. So, you know, when we talk about sort of women in the workforce, it's important to remember that it's not just about equal opportunity for the woman. It's about the work that gets done in the workforce. Corporate boards that have women directors take on less risk and make more money. That's a win-win. Doctors who are women listen differently to patients. They have different skills at diagnosis. The experience of gender shapes how we do our jobs and how others perceive us in really powerful ways. And so I think we need

to be thinking about, yes, how we're going to forgive student loan debt, but I don't want to do that without solving the forward problem. Because I think as hard as it is for students and young people to form a meaningful coalition and get elected officials to listen to them, the next generation of students really has no ability to do that. individual responsibility to a collective investment that we are making in our workforce and in our ability to compete globally in exactly the same way I was talking about child care. So whenever people say to me, well, you know, and I hear this a lot, politicians who talk about student loan debt, only when they're talking to groups of students, they're really missing the fact that the fact that education is so expensive is creating problems for seniors and who goes to medical school and the number of people who pursue

primary care and gerontology specialties as opposed to higher paying surgical practices. It's reshaping our whole economy. So I do support forgiving student loan debt, but I really think we need to tie it to how we stop the next generation getting into debt because I'm afraid if we cancel it debt, but I really think we need to tie it to how we stop the next generation getting into debt. Because I'm afraid if we cancel it now, but don't solve the forward-going problem, that we'll lose that momentum to really reshape how we think about education as an investment. So I'm going to try and take three questions together and give you 30 seconds to answer all three. Okay, so get ready. That's what I do to my witnesses, so I can't complain. Whiteboard energy. Samantha Yee, who is one of our legislative competition winners,

would like to know about what things surprised you, whether good or bad, about your time as a member of Congress. Someone else has also asked, is there something that you didn't expect as a member of Congress and that you've actually now encountered, and what was that? And then finally, one of our attendees would like to know how, as a woman, you deal with imposter syndrome being in a place like Congress that was not necessarily set up with someone like you in mind. Yeah, great question. So what surprised me, I think, is how grossly inefficient Congress is. So it's not just that we have partisan gridlock, it's that the whole thing is just designed and run by people for whom time is not the precious commodity that it is for me as a single parent. So this idea of like, well, we'll just kick that vote to tomorrow, as if tomorrow is not a day that

childcare costs me $400 or $300 or whatever it is. And so just the structural kind of inefficiencies of Congress and Congress's unwillingness to change that. I mean, during the pandemic, as we started to move to making at least some things remote, the most common thing I was told was, well, not everybody is technologically savvy, to which I replied, and are they also unable to learn anything? I mean, they don't know how to use the internet. Teach them. They don't know how to use Zoom. Train them. We asked kids and small business owners to make so many kinds, students to make so many kinds of adjustments during this pandemic, and Congress can't learn how to load Zoom onto their phone was really frustrating. And that's a long-term project

about how we renovate Congress to make it more efficient. And that's as much of a reason that we don't get things done as partisan gridlock. In terms of like what I didn't expect, I guess I ran for Congress, and Melissa, you might remember this from our first conversation. I went to Congress because I wanted to work on policy problems. So I wanted to see my law review article go or see my friends' articles go from ideas to realities in people's lives. And for that to happen, we usually need to enact a law. What I didn't expect was how little I would like that process and just how much it would frustrate me. Because so many of the ideas that we're voting on, I mean, if Congress had a motto,

slogan, it would be something like solving yesterday's problems tomorrow, maybe. Right? So people are like, I have this great bill you should get on. I have introduced this bill every year since the 1840s. I mean, it's like the ability to bring new ideas and reflect today's problems and get to them in time before they get to be really, really deep and structural. And I've sort of been surprised, like I love being in my district, that part of the job, talking to constituents, touring businesses, meeting with groups, all of that, I absolutely love because it's all about learning. Whereas most of the time that I spend in Washington, I'm not learning, right? I'm just seeing the sort of problems in the system. In terms of imposter syndrome, I mean, there have definitely been moments that I have experienced things like that, both actual experiences and kind of internal doubts.

You know, most, many, many, probably dozens and dozens of time, when I walk into the Capitol, the police will, they're supposed to notice your, this is our congressional ID, it's this pin, and they're supposed to notice it. And the police are supposed to know who you are. And I walk in and I will get chased down the hallway. Lady, lady, you can't go in that door. Right. And I have never seen that happen to a man.

So, but I think what's made it possible is having a group of people and having others who are going through that in the same way. Really young colleagues who get treated like they're interns. Colleagues, you know, who confound the expectation of who can do this work really successfully and really, really well. And so, you know, I think having that group of people who are going through that experience with you you realize that it's not about you it's about them it's about what other it's about the society's expectations it's not that I'm not I mean I remember saying to my scheduler crying one day am I not dressed up like do I not I'm not wearing the right outfit I have my pin on like

I put makeup on I I brushed my hair. What do these policemen want from me so that I too can be recognized as a congressperson? And so, you know, I think the fact that I wasn't the only one having that experience was helpful in terms of understanding that people who need to change are them and not me. Congress needs to make space for people like me

and people who are different than me and different from those who have come before. We hope you enjoyed all of the big whiteboard energy from this special episode of Strict Scrutiny. Many, many thanks

to Representative Katie Porter for joining us and to Abigail Seidner and Claire Whitman of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Network for facilitating the audio transfer and putting on such a great symposium. If you'd like to learn more about the BWLN and its upcoming events, please follow them on Twitter at BWLN underscore NYU.

As always, we are so grateful to Melody Rowell, our terrific producer, and Eddie Cooper, who does our music. They make us sound fantastic and we love them for it. If you'd like to support the pod, you can do so by purchasing awesome Strict Scrutiny swag from our website, www.strictscrutinypodcast.com, or by subscribing at glow.fm forward slash strict scrutiny. We'll talk to you soon.