The Daily Beast Podcast - BONUS - Rep. Katie Porter on How Working Moms Are Wiping Congress' Ass

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Surprise! As a bonus for our listeners, we have released an interview with Congresswoman Katie Porter who represents California’s 45th District. She tells us about how single mothers are changing congress, why her workplace is often dysfunctional and the resolution she’s supporting to demilitarize the police. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey folks, Rick Wilson here. Today, Molly and I have a special bonus episode of the new abnormal for you featuring an interview with Representative Katie Porter, who represents California's 45th District. She was elected in 2018 and has become famous for being one of the members of Congress in the majority now who likes things like accountability and math. This is why we love her and we are so delighted to have you with us today. Welcome. I had a question for you about being a single mom. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? One of the interesting things is there are now,

particularly with the election of this 2018 class, a number of my colleagues who were raised by single parents. Angie Craig is a great example of this. And I love hearing them because I always think to myself, there's some hope for my children to turn out because these other people were raised by single moms and they're turning out great. But I do think it's different when you're living the experience

and trying to make policy. And so there's a lot of ways, in which this pandemic, I think, has highlighted the longstanding challenges faced by single parents. And more single parents are women than men. But I think the challenges fall equally on, but not being a single parent more than it is about being a single mom. There are just a lot more single moms out there. But look, we see this in the statistics really clear with you. We look compared to a year ago, the percentage of single mothers with jobs is down 22%.

And that's compared to a 9% drop for other families with children. So much, much disproportional impact here of job loss being felt by single parents. Part of that is because they often are able to only get and maintain low-wage jobs. They have much higher job turnover, sometimes because they're forced to take unpaid leave, to care for their kids. You know, the reality is that the pandemic has fallen harder on women than men, but really doubly or triply hard, I think, on single moms. And yet, Congress doesn't seem to understand that.

And I'll just give you one example. When Congress passed the CARES Act, the $1, $1,000, economic impact payment, there's an income threshold at which that payment begins to fade out. And it was set at $75,000 for a single person and $150,000 for a married couple, joint filing taxes. And this was presented on a caucus call, and I asked a question. I was like, well, what about single parent? Like, my filing status isn't either of those things. What about single parents who file typically as head. of households. And they said, well, their income cutoff is halfway in between. And I thought to myself, I said, that makes no sense. Single parents have more economic challenges than a two-earner family or a

potential two-earner family because they're in the worst of both worlds. They only have one income. So if there's a job loss, it falls really heavily on them. That is, they go to zero income. And they have dependents, which is not something that people find singly have. Why on earth would you not give them the best phase out, right, the best tax treatment. And the response was that actually traditionally, Congress has treated single moms like single people without children. So this was actually progress, I was told, to put heads of household in this interbeen between married couples and single workers rather than just treating them like single taxpayers. And so it was an interesting example, though, of not really recognizing the challenge that single moms face. You've become a

fearsome sort of questioner to a lot of administration and other witnesses that come before you. I want to ask you, what is it about the mystical power of math and research that scares them so much? Because you seem to have the numbers down before they walk in. And they still don't get it that you're going to come after them. You know, I think a lot of it is really about preparing in a way that is designed to get to an endpoint. So when I was a lot, I draw a lot on my past work as a classroom teacher in doing this. So when I would go into a class, I always had a lesson plan. I always knew what I wanted the students to know at the end of the class.

And so then how was I going to back the students into having that answer, right? And so it's going in saying like, what if the student's unprepared? What if the student gives the wrong answer? What if the student goes sideways and tries to give me an excuse? How will I go ahead and get them to a correct answer and then using that same skill set with these witnesses? I will tell you, and I think in the early days, I was very much underestimated. I don't think they had any idea what they were dealing with. Now, I see witnesses, they come in and they visibly look worried.

Like the number of people, witnesses who take a sip of water or like kind of chug water right before it's my turn to question. I'll never forget. I came into the hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, and he sort of looked right at me and gave me a little smile and a nod, and I thought, like, that is not going to help. I do think that the fact that this is considered so novel reflects a problem. And you mentioned sort of the traditions of Washington. And it's true that administrative agencies have traditions, but so does Congress. And some of those traditions exist for really good reasons and are things we should celebrate and maintain. But some of those traditions are things that probably should go.

It was traditional that women couldn't work outside the home. And I'm glad that tradition is no longer with us and that women have a choice now. Do you have other traditions that you think should go in Congress? Well, I mean, I think over this debate about remote voting and kind of how it's unfolded has illustrated one of the things that I think that sort of how we sometimes cling to tradition and get it confused with our legal obligations and our moral obligations to our constituent. And so it's true that Congress has never in its long tradition voted remotely or operated remotely. When you look at the fact that we didn't move quickly to adopt those procedures, that's a tradition that really prevented us from a effectively working for the first, at least in terms of legislative voting, it inhibited our ability to effectively work for a matter of weeks. And so I was on a remote briefing this morning. I got to question the inspector general for the Department of Labor twice. And I got answers from him. And it was really, really helpful. And we got ideas for legislation out of that. I did that all of that

from my kitchen, right here at home, on Zoom. And we're going to be able to share that with our constituents. So I think the remote voting is a good example. But I was also going to say this tradition of Congress kind of pontificating during their five minutes rather than asking a question. You know, so many of my colleagues are really very kind to compliment my style of questioning. And a couple of them have said, like, I don't know how you do it. And I'm sure they're being rhetorical when they say that. But I'm, of course, giving like a literal reply. And I'm like, well, you know, first step in asking a good question is not to talk the whole five minutes yourself.

But you do have to be really prepared and a little bit. bit brave and willing to take some risks to do that because just like when you call on a student in class, you don't know if that student's going to give a right answer or a wrong answer. You don't know if they're going to be excellent or give excuses. And that back and forth with students can require us to give a little bit of control of your classroom to the students that what you get out of it is really seeing what they know. And it's the same thing with hearings. When you ask a question, you're giving some control to the witness. But what you get out of it potentially is the witness really understanding what the witness does and doesn't know or it will or will not say. So I think a lot about

the expression truth to power and people want to speak truth to power. And I think that's important. I really do. But I think what's even more important is how do we get powerful people to come to the truth, to admit the truth themselves? Because it is more powerful to hear Jamie Diamond say, I don't know. I've never thought about it than it is for me to lecture at him. So you were just in Congress a few months when you did that. That sort of blew everyone away. And I think it was the moment you really became incredibly famous. Well, I mean, one thing about the questioning, and I think this is another example of a tradition from Congress that probably should go away, is it really matters to have great staff. I work with a team. I have amazing people who brainstorm with me, who come up with ideas, who practice with me. We, you know, not every idea that they have. or I have is a good one. And until we go through a process in order to figure out what to ask a witness about. And the idea for that questioning came from a staff member. And yes, only I am the person who sits there and executes it. And that requires one skill set. But I rarely hear my colleagues

talk about their staff. It's like this part of politics that I think is really wrongheaded, which is to pretend that the member of Congress kind of does it all. The candidate pulls it all out of a hat. And it's like, no, there are amazing, hardworking, smart, dedicated, caring people who are putting together information, who are doing research, who have depth of knowledge that one person by themselves could never have, who make those moments possible. And I just don't hear, I'm always surprised that I don't hear my colleagues talking about and acknowledging their staff. And I think it's a mistake to not help the American public understand that we work as part of teams. I mean, why on earth you would want us to do it by ourselves? Well, we could do it with the help of

talented people. I have no idea. But I think that's something about politics that we ought to change is really acknowledging all of the teamwork that goes into those moments. You know, Congressman, that is an area I think that you have justly become sort of well known for is that preparation, which obviously is staffed in some capacity. Do you feel like there's a lack of preparation from other people, or is it so on the Republican side right now, it seems so agenda driven? With regard to fundraising, it's important to remember that ethical rules prohibit the questioning that we do on the official side as being used for any fundraising purpose. So the work that we do in committee is for the American people. I do think that on both side, that agenda driven questioning can happen on both sides. But I think it comes from more this not knowing what you want to get out of the witness and thinking about too much about what you want for yourself. And so that then leads to people speechifying rather than engaging with the witness in an iterative way in a real questioning. process. And so I think that's part of it. Like I said, is seeding some control. I also think that you have

to have trust in your staff and your staff has to have trust in you. And you have to be in a number of hours that I spend with my staff is incredible on the phone, reading their work product, providing feedback, coming up with ideas. I don't sort of take their work product and they put it in a binder and maybe I look at it or maybe I don't. I read everything that they produced and give feedback on all of it. And I'm sure that makes me exhausting member of Congress to work for, but it also creates rewards because they are constantly getting to know what I'm thinking and we are making each other's work stronger. And so I think to the extent that people treat those hearings kind of in a routinized way, we think about each hearing as its own distinct thing. What is the point of this hearing? What is the underlying problem or societal

or economic situation that has given rise to this hearing? And what do we want to be able to to get out of this, to be able to help the American people. And then we back our way into questioning. And I think for a lot of people, it just becomes a routine thing. Like, okay, here comes this person. Let me ask him about this thing that was in the news. And you just ask that kind of general question, where are your thoughts? I mean, you're just going to get a bunch of rambling nonsense. So I didn't ask my law students questions like, what are your thoughts, unfair and deceptive practices. I don't care what their thoughts are. I care if you know the law, if you know how to apply it, force it. I mean, you've got opinions. Reddit's out there for you. My classroom is not that

kind of venue. And I don't think hearings should be either. You mentioned the Zuckerberg hearing earlier. I think a lot of what came out of that, he clearly is not accustomed to having accountability functions from public officials. Do you feel like that's like the emerging area? Because I'm of a mind that we're going to have a social media explosion here over their role in our politics, society and everything else and their relative power over the consumer sooner rather than later. Yeah, and I think one of the things with social media is that it's an example of an area that falls into, I not want to say cracks because they're more like canyons between areas of congressional responsibility. And so when you look at the committee structure of the House of Representatives, these committees were set up quite a while ago and they don't change very often. And so it was a really big deal. And like we added space onto the Science and Technology Committee. Like, ooh, we have this new frontier called space. Like, town. that onto something, social media and technology companies generally fall within the purview of so many different committees, which can be good because you can be looking at them from different angles,

but can lead to a lack of any one committee really having the buck stops here responsibility. And I would say the same thing kind of happens with healthcare. So even though energy and commerce and the health care subcommittee is kind of maybe the main place, because so much of our health care is administered through Medicare, Medicaid, through tax programs, tax deductions for private health insurance plans. You really have ways and means and energy and commerce, both engaging there. And so I think social media companies have really exploited some of those jurisdictional canyons to operate in. And so even with Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, the ostensible point of his being there was to talk about Libra,

which was Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency. And, you know, I just felt like that was such a patly bad idea that I didn't feel the need to use my time on that. And instead, you used my time to talk about Facebook's role as a social moderator of conduct and the work that social media moderators perform and really asking Mr. Zuckerberg, would he be willing to do that job for a few hours a week and to sit in the shoes of those social media moderators who spend hours and hours and hours a day in relatively low-age jobs in very difficult conditions, viewing violent content. What a lot of people are talking that today is police brutality and the amendment you're supporting. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so I'm supporting a resolution that has been offered by my colleagues, Ianna Presley,

Ilhan Omar, Karen Bass, and others, and what this, probably, I believe, is the other co-sponsor. And so this is a resolution to really put on the table exactly what the problem is and to openly acknowledge it and to not treat it as isolated and to locate the tragic death George Floyd in light of these larger problems within our policing system. And then this resolution really names kind of describes the problem, which is well known and is longstanding, sadly, tragically. And then I think what we're looking to do, what I'm looking to do as a Congress member is identify the best policy solutions that Congress could put in place. And those range from things like demilitarizing the police. I'm involved in scouts and have been on a couple tours of our local

police station with my scout groups. And I was shocked to learn that the city of Irvine, the safest city of its size in the United States, for like a decade running. So this is, this is the most incredibly safe communities in the country that I have the privilege to live in and to represent. But the city of Irvine police, they have the tank. Kind of a Humvee, like type. Probably an MRAP. Exactly. Like, what on earth are they going to do with this in the city of Irvine? We're very close to Los Angeles. We're very close to San Diego. We're close to Camp Pendleton. We have other resources if we ever were to have a need for that kind of equipment. And so the demilitarization of the police is an important part of this. Brian Schatz, Senator Schatz has a bill on this that I'm looking to talk with him about. And then also, I have a longstanding interest in mental health. And this is a topic that you know, you always hear bipartisan, oh, mental health, it's so important. And yet, when you look at the treatment options and availability of mental health treatment and how. how we as a society deal with mental health issues,

we've really moved backwards in the last 30 or 40 years from where we were in the 60s and 70s. And some of that is about how private insurance deals with mental health. Some of it is efforts to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness, which is important. But at the same time, we've reduced resources to address. So when you have people coming in on 72-hour holds, they spend that entire time restrain in an ER before they're released again.

They go right back out there. and face challenges. And so I'm interested in how can we, where really are the best practices. And having that policy debate about what works and what doesn't work in terms of how do we recognize that police officers respond to all, their first responders for all kinds of situations, not just for violent crime. And certainly as someone who had to call 911 more than once during my divorce, I had two extremely different responses from the police force depending on the particular officer who responded. And it made a huge difference in how that situation unfolded and in my family getting helped. What you just said about, it's not the distrust is Republican and Democrat.

Do you sometimes feel like you could form a third party of like radical competence? I feel like there's a market need out there in our politics for competent people. Yeah. No, and I think like part of it is that helping the American people understand what doing the job competently looks like. And so showing them what we do and being straightforward about what this job involves. And I think there's potential with social media, for example, and with more video and things like that to be more revealing about that. I can think of several moments in which I think that's happened.

But you do have to be doing something if you're going to show the American people what you are doing. Right. So there's a sort of a prefatory point there. Coronavirus. How would you like to see this legislated? A couple of things. I think there's both a health component and then an economic component to this. And, you know, the health component, obviously, there was.

was a lack of preparation for this kind of pandemic. There's chronic underfunding of public health. And then there's sort of delivery mechanisms and sort of political problems coming out of, frankly, out of the White House, I think. And it's very hard to solve a supply chain problem. And if you don't know where the stuff's going out of the strategic stockpile, I remember being on a telephone briefing, I was sitting in my garage because it was quiet. My kids were obviously running around. But I remember someone like Congress members asked a question about where did the equipment, the personal protective equipment in the strategic stockpile go. And the person on the briefing, the government officials said, we're tracking that down. And I thought, oh, Lord, it's like, Lord, help us.

But I think the economic consequences of this are equally important. And I think, you know, my own view is that a sort of paycheck recovery type approach where the government would step in and allow, help businesses meet their payroll would have been and still is preferable to what we did, which was plus up a huge range of social service programs, frankly, because we've seen a lot of problems with those programs meeting the need. Administratively, right? State and Employment Department struggling to meet the need.

Food assistance programs, struggling to meet the need. And I call constituents and talk with them, and one of the things that I hear from them is a lot of them have never had to ask for help before. They've never applied for government assistance of any kind before. And they would just prefer to have their paycheck and continue to meet their needs. And there is not a one-size-fits-all family. And so there may be families out there who have expenses of one kind and not another. And in trying to plus up all these different

social programs, there's an element in Congress trying to figure out what they think families need, and you get just enough of this and not too much of that. I think a better approach here is to avoid the massive labor market disruption of people losing their jobs. Because I think when those corporations we hire, that causes a lot of problems for people. Workers will be displaced. There's a lot of corruption in the Trump administration. Like, will there be a way in the end to sort of figure out who stole what and hold people accountable? Well, our inspector generals, despite the fact that they're under very challenging circumstances, they're watching some of their colleagues be terminated by this president. I think in general, our inspector generals do amazing work. And this probably

reveals just how truly nerdy I am and just how much getting on the oversight committee was like a dream come true for me. But our nation's inspector generals have a Twitter account. You can actually get on Twitter any inspector general report that comes out will be retweeted by this inspector general thing. It's just amazing to read these and see what they're recommending. And a lot of these problems, they get recommended year after year after year. Fix this. Fix this. fix this, and it doesn't happen. And so I think, yes, there's a need for, there is corruption, but we also need to be doing our role in Congress of taking their good advice. And so I think that's a big part of it. I'm watching kind of interestingly sort of Mark Meadows, who as my colleague was on the

oversight committee and was a big fan of Inspector Generals, is he now that he's part of the administrative branch going to carry that forward? I hope that he will because I think they do great work during this period, but we also have to try to anticipate some of the likely problems in real time and avoid them. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

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