‘We need new ideas.’ Rep. Katie Porter discusses immigration, Israel, housing, Trump | Opinion

The following interview was conducted on Dec. 15 by members of McClatchy California Editorial Boards and Rep. Katie Porter, a candidate to represent California in the U.S. Senate. It has been edited for length and clarity.

McClatchy California: Please give us your opening statement.

Rep. Katie Porter: It is incredibly clear to those in my generation and younger generations that Washington, D.C. is broken. We have seen Washington fail to act on our most pressing issue, often siding with special interests and corporations over California. In instances where progress has been made, it has been too little, too late. Before my election six years ago, I worked as a consumer advocate and law professor. I sat with families across the state who had lost their homes to predatory lenders. My time outside of Washington is an asset. I didn’t spend the last 20 years being wined and dined by lobbyists in D.C. Instead, I spent those years holding corporate cheaters and government bureaucrats asleep at the wheel to account.

Now, in Congress, I have developed a reputation for doing Congress differently. I am one of just 11 members of the House and the only person in this race who refuses contributions from federal lobbyists, and I am the only person in this race who has never, ever taken corporate PAC money. I didn’t change my stance on that to boost my credibility in this Senate race. It is core to who I am, and it reflects why I do things in Washington differently.

I want to deliver a strong, stable, globally competitive economy that delivers for everyday people, not just for Wall Street. It has animated my work, including my fight to make communities more resilient and hold polluters accountable for the damages they are doing to our planet and our communities.

Opinion

McClatchy: Should the U.S. call for a ceasefire in Gaza?

Porter: I want to start by acknowledging what a terrible and tragic conflict this is, and how painful it is for so many Americans — the loss of Israeli lives, the loss of Palestinian lives, the humanitarian crisis and the potential unraveling of long standing policy, like the two-state solution. This is a conflict between Israel and Hamas. I support Israel’s right to defend itself and its goal of eradicating Hamas, which was not serving the Palestinian people long before Oct. 7.

At the same time, I think we have to think about what the role of the United States is here. I think it is to push for the preconditions to a lasting ceasefire that includes things like rebuilding the hard and soft infrastructure of Gaza; the safe return of hostages; addressing things like settler violence in the West Bank, which has only worsened during this conflict; and thinking about how we can lay the foundation for a peaceful, democratic Gaza that will allow Israel to be secure.

I was very supportive of the humanitarian pauses and I called for those and I think they were the right step toward allowing the parties to get to a lasting ceasefire. But the peace that we’re struggling for here needs to be one that allows Israel to be secure and allows the people of Gaza to flourish. And I’m very concerned that the unfolding humanitarian disaster that we’re seeing in Gaza is moving us away from peace rather than closer to it.

MC: So if I’m understanding you correctly, you would not support an immediate ceasefire?

Porter: I think the goal here is to have a pause that will allow for the conditions to be set for there to be a ceasefire. What is the difference between a ceasefire and a pause? It’s the duration that the ceasefire lasts. It stays, it’s durable. And more and more and longer pauses are the right step toward doing that. I strongly approve and urge the United States to continue asking really tough questions of Israel to understand what it has done to minimize civilian casualties and what it means when it says, “eradicate Hamas.” But I’m very concerned that if we simply get people to say the word “ceasefire” that doesn’t mean the conditions on the ground change.

Editor’s note: Rep. Porter revised her position since this interview was conducted. On Dec. 18, she announced that she supports “working toward a lasting bilateral ceasefire in Gaza.”

MC: In exchange for approving more aid to Ukraine, congressional Republicans want Democrats to agree to dramatically eliminate the options migrants have to claim asylum from the United States and to ramp up the detention and deportation of migrants. Should President Biden negotiate border security in exchange for Ukrainian aid?

Porter: I want to push back on the idea that what is being talked about in terms of standards for asylum making our borders more secure. What it’s going to do is leave people unable to seek refuge in the United States and be a long-standing change in U.S. policy and international law. I support meaningful border security, meaning I support making investments and things like technology tools and better training. But what is being offered up here in the name of border security is actually just anti-immigrant sentiment that would be a fundamental attack on the United States’ core values.

We in California know that immigrants add to our society, to our economy, are vital parts of our community and we would not be the amazing state and country that we are without them. I don’t think coupling aid for Ukraine and border security in the same conversation is productive. I think it’s political brinkmanship.

MC: It’s been reported that you and the other two leading candidates for this Senate seat vote the same about 94% of the time. What distinguishes you from the other two?

Porter: I’m proud to be running with colleagues who, like me, for example, support every American’s freedom to make their own decision about abortion and making health care more affordable for families, but there are differences. Part of these differences are based on our experiences. I haven’t been in Washington for 20 or 25 years. And I think I have seen in my adult life some of the consequences of a D.C. that is too concerned with standing with big corporations and not willing to push hard and fast enough to address problems.

In my adult life, we have seen elected officials kick the can down the road and do too little, too late on climate change, for example. Now, we are living with the reality that natural disasters caused by climate change are costing us $150 billion a year. I’m interested in making sure that Congress rebuilds the trust of the American people. The American people have long been skeptical about whether or not politicians are fighting for them or doing the bidding of lobbyists. So I think the fact that I do not take corporate PAC money, I don’t take lobbyist money and I’m willing to hold leaders of both parties to account sets me apart. I’ve been willing to do things including vote against my own party when I thought that was important, and to stake out positions that were not just to get along for the sake of getting along but were value-based decisions for Californians that created a better foundation of trust in government.

MC: Can you name a time or two when you did vote against the Democratic Party when you felt it was necessary?

Porter: I would point to the votes on the National Defense Authorization Act, which I voted against, as an example of that. I’ve also shown in hearings that I’m willing to ask questions that others don’t ask. For example, in May of 2020, months after Americans were risking their lives during COVID, Congress finally got around to having a hearing about the pandemic. There were 45 members who asked questions before me. I was literally last in line when I managed to challenge the CDC director to make COVID testing free. That’s an existing law. Any member — Democrat or Republican — could have picked up that law designed for a moment just like that and called on the government to use it.

I have also pushed back at the idea of earmarks. I think they invite corruption. What we should be fighting for is California getting its fair share of funding, particularly in areas where we have led the way and yet are getting short-changed, like the development of green energy. We did the research, we did the development, we made the changes at the state level and yet we’re seeing those green energy jobs go to anti-worker and anti-environment states.

MC: You’ve been either leading or tied with Adam Schiff in public opinion polls, yet at the Democratic State Convention you received support from 16% of the delegates, trailing the other two by a large margin. How do you explain that?

Porter: The delegate vote is a mix of people who are Democratic Party members elected in their local community and delegates who were appointed by people who are in office or who have run for office. That is a very different group than California is generally.

We are a diverse political state — there’s a wide range of political perspectives. The public opinion polls are really designed to reflect what the likely electorate is going to look like. And I’ve been really proud to have won over Democratic voters, Independent voters and Republican voters in Orange County three times now in order to get elected. I’ve been excited to see very high support from younger voters, Latino voters and AAPI voters — groups that the Democratic Party has often struggled to build a deep engagement with.

I’m going to continue to work really hard. I’m a tough street campaigner. I have knocked on thousands of doors in the last cycle alone in some of our most purple and challenging political communities, like Huntington Beach. People are going to see that I have been a constant and frequent contact in conversation with colleagues.

I also want to mention that the state party endorsement does not always produce victories. I myself am evidence of that. When I ran in 2018 for Congress, the state party endorsed my colleague, now state Sen. Dave Min, yet I went on to win the primary.

MC: Climate change is requiring California to adapt its water management and develop new supplies. What is your position on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Delta conveyance project? And how do you plan, as senator, to address California’s water challenges?

Porter: We don’t have 100-year drought, but we have water infrastructure and a water system that is more than 100 years old in many cases. As a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, I have put my time behind my talking points in terms of my interest in things like climate, including water. We need to focus on building infrastructure that is going to help us make sensible and smart use of every single drop of water we have. We need more stormwater recapture, and we need more water recycling. I live in and represent a community that is a great example of that. Orange County has the largest water recycling plants in the world. Even as Irvine’s population has tripled in the last few decades, our water use has been cut in half. That’s the kind of model that we need to be bringing to not just all of California, but across the United States. We are actually taking recycled water and sending it back uphill to the Central Valley to be used by farmers. That’s the kind of cooperative approach to water that I think should determine our forward looking approach with regard to the Delta Tunnels.

We want to make sure we make our water infrastructure more secure so that we have water to meet all of California’s needs. We should evaluate every one of these projects, including this one, very carefully.

MC: California has been a leader in transitioning to clean energy, yet we’re still having trouble meeting our goals at the federal level. What actions need to be taken?

Porter: This is a national and, I would say, even international challenge in that there’s only so much any one state — even California — can do on its own. We have to have politicians who are not beholden to big oil and big corporations, who are going to do the work of trying to build the political will across the United States to recognize that investing in climate change is a smart economic investment. We always come up against the price tag in these arguments. But the truth is that we can’t afford not to make these investments.

The costs of climate-related disasters are hitting families and communities. We are dealing with a global situation in which the country that is able to have manufacturing jobs in the future is the country that’s going to have to figure out how to manufacture in a cleaner, greener way. And green energy is going to be the major driver of good, high-paying union jobs in California.

As we make this transition, I’m always thinking about two risks we need to build into every decision. One is efforts to use industry change to attract workers. There will be winners and losers among corporate America, as well as in certain communities, in this transition. Second, we need to be forward-thinking about putting these jobs in the communities that need them.

The other thing I’m very cognizant of is the environmental justice harms of fossil fuels. We cannot replicate environmental racism as we transition to fossil fuels. I’ve educated myself even more than I already am as a member of the Natural Resources Committee. I toured South LA to see the environmental challenges they’re facing. How are we going to avoid these mistakes while holding polluters to account to clean up their own messes?

We have to put green energy on a level playing field. So much of the conversation devolves into: Who is getting a subsidy and how much is this going to cost us? The truth is that we already subsidize oil and gas by tens of billions of dollars a year. I am the proud co-sponsor of a bill with my colleagues Illinois Rep. Sean Casten and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer that would stop tax subsidies for the oil and gas industries, putting them on a level playing field and making sure that we are charging polluters who drill on our public lands at a royalty rate that is market based and reflects what we should be getting for our public lands. That royalty rate hasn’t been raised in 100 years. And that legislation was included as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

MC: Does America’s debt concern you? And, if so, what would you propose to do about it?

Porter: Every taxpayer — every Californian — should want all of our tax dollars to be spent as wisely as possible. Democrats should own that issue, because we’re the ones that are often pointing to ways that government investment and government spending can actually help us build our economy in the long run.

We have to be really good stewards of our tax dollars. This means being unafraid to call out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. I have done this time and time again, taking on everything from the F-35 program and the boondoggle and waste, fraud and abuse we’ve seen in the Pentagon budget and we continue to see. That means making sure we’re having real oversight plans built into programs when we pass them. Washington does way too much of announcing and patting themselves on the back and press releases, but not building in a plan that looks over time at whether a program is working.

This cuts both ways. Sometimes that means we fail to invest in our very, very best ideas that are working. And sometimes that means we continue to pour money into things that are not delivering for the American people. I think my record on oversight here is an important one. I’m not afraid to call out and take on things I don’t think are working.

The conventional wisdom of Washington sometimes needs to be challenged in this regard. I have seen time and time again colleagues say, “I have a bill on that topic and I’ve been trying to pass it for 16 years.” Well, the world has sometimes changed in 16 years — different research, different ideas, different challenges. We need new ideas and we need to take a hard look at each and every program.

For example, we have heard time and time again about the cost of providing parental leave. Having paid parental leave would dramatically boost our economy. The costs are miniscule by comparison. You hear about the cost of paying state workers or federal workers. But when I asked the director of the Office of Management and Budget — effectively Congress’ HR person — what does it cost to lose a worker? And what does it cost to hire and train and get someone back with those years of experience? They don’t collect that data.

I really want to push Washington to write an oversight plan into every bill we write. I was really frustrated during the pandemic, for example, when we rolled out expanded unemployment — which is something I believe in — that there was not enough awareness and willingness to recognize that our unemployment systems, including in California, are operating with outdated software and have high rates of existing fraud. The headlines about that were written in 2012 and 2013, and they just came true again. We can’t pour money into programs that can’t actually deliver the aid. We saw the same things with the Small Business Administration. They were not set up to actually meet the need. And, as a result of that, we had a lot of abuse and skepticism about those programs, even if they ultimately delivered good.

MC: Many moderates believe that the border crossings of migrants is a genuine crisis. Would you say we have a crisis at the border? And, if you’re elected to the Senate, what would you propose to deal with the spikes in border crossings?

Porter: There’s no doubt that we’re having challenges at our border. Whether that devolves into a true humanitarian crisis has a lot to do with what’s happening at the state and county and municipal level in our border cities. Border policies in California’s San Ysidro do not bear much resemblance to border policies in McAllen, Texas. We have very, very different responses from local and state governments.

Just a large number of migrants I would not characterize in itself as a crisis. But if we’re not able to welcome and deal with and adjudicate the rights of those migrants in a fair and just way consistent with our laws, that’s when it topples over into a crisis. We need to assess the right level of immigration. What does our economy need to grow? Are we in the middle of a worker shortage? I’ve heard that from a lot of businesses, yet we hear that we have too many people wanting to come to this country and work hard for a living and take those jobs.

I think we need to have a really robust and thoughtful conversation on making sure that our border communities have the resources they need to deal with the number of migrants that are coming. At the same time, if we think that the number of migrants is unsustainable or too high, we need to be making investments in the countries where migrants are coming from to make life more sustainable for them.

It’s a dangerous, difficult journey to the United States, particularly for women and children. Many people make that journey because they are fearing for their lives and fleeing violence. President Obama was making investments and trying to clean up police corruption and deliver better justice in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and President Trump gutted all of that funding and stopped those programs just as they were starting to have a real effect on the ground.

I’m always cautious about people who rely on raw numbers. I think it’s designed to sensationalize when seeking a better life in the United States is an incredibly personal, individual and human experience.

MC: You were only one of 35 Democrats to cast a “no” vote on House resolution 2500, the National Defense Authorization Act, which, among other things, would have stipulated that funding provided in the act would not be allowed to fund housing for unaccompanied migrant children. Can you tell us why you voted on this house resolution in 2020 the way you did?

Porter: I try to look each time at the specific provisions. One of the problems with the NDAA is that it’s a behemoth, and it’s intentionally made that way by politicians who don’t want to take individual votes on these issues so they pour it all into the NDAA. They attempt to say that if you don’t support it, then you’re not supporting our people who serve in uniform.

With regard to military housing for unaccompanied immigrants, the reality is that we had a really, really challenging problem providing housing for unaccompanied children at that time. We saw in Pendleton when we were welcoming refugees from Afghanistan that the military is good at building rapid, quality housing to shelter people.

At the same time, I don’t think we ought to be militarizing immigration. I remember in 2020 having a debate with my colleagues, including Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, about this. I think we should be leery about bringing the military into civilian issues like immigration. But I have also seen that there are few institutions in our government that can deploy and deliver help more quickly and on the ground than the U.S. military, which is why we sometimes deploy them in natural disasters, and we should not be unwilling to employ them in humanitarian ones either.

MC: On the subject of interesting bills that have come up for a vote, there was one on denouncing the horrors of socialism that came before the House. Rep. Adam Schiff supported it. You did not. Why?

Porter: I’m a believer that capitalism with correct guardrails and investments is the best economic system. But I think these are gotcha votes designed to trap vulnerable members. And I was a vulnerable member. I had a tough Orange County seat at the time. But I don’t think we ought to let Republicans turbocharge an already charged political environment with issues like this.

The reality is that there are many, many socialist countries in which there are horrific things going on. But there are also capitalist countries in which there are human rights abuses, in which there are wars, in which there are other struggles. This is an example of a kind of gotcha vote that we shouldn’t take a debate on. We should be able to stand on our own two feet in town halls month after month, like I have, and simply explain to our constituents what we stand for.

The Bee: What do you fear most about a second Donald Trump presidency?

Porter: Such a long list. The harm to our institutions is probably at the top of that list. They are already pretty fragile. Any kid who has ever played with Legos, including my boys, knows that it takes a long time to build something and a very quick time to tear it down.

We saw in the Trump presidency that these institutions are a lot more vulnerable than we thought they were. People kept saying, “Why don’t we have a rule to stop somebody from doing this?” And the answer was, because it hadn’t occurred to us. Things like the Emoluments Clause — we don’t take that one out of our pocket every day.

We need to think about how to safeguard our institutions, and how to do institutional reform. And not just on the Supreme Court, which my colleagues are quick to talk about — and I champion those reforms too. But we shouldn’t pretend that Congress or the presidency is immune to needing a tougher look.

As somebody who spends a lot of her time working on economic issues and has spent a lot of her career seeing the harms that debt and poverty due to communities, especially low-income, working-class communities, it’s very clear to me that when Donald Trump says the economy is doing well, he means one thing and one thing only: that he and his rich cronies are making money.

MC: You’ve spoken a lot about being a single mother and the difficulties of performing your job duties as a single mother. There are more than 15 million single mother households in the United States, yet you are one of the few single mothers in Congress. Can you talk a little bit about what you think could be done to change the culture of Congress to make it more hospitable for mothers and single mothers?

Porter: We all benefit when we have a Congress and a government that is representative because it animates us to fight harder. Child care is a great example. Every time an issue comes up, the first thing that gets dropped from a bill is always child care. That’s exactly what happened with the Build Back Better Act. And I was so furious about it. It was really, really hard for me to vote for that one after its rebrand — as much good as there was — because it did not contain child care.

Every economist will tell you child care grows our economy and helps address long-standing issues of inequality, including for women of color.

In terms of structural issues with Congress, we should implement changes like redesigning the calendar so that we spend more days working in D.C., more days working in our community and less time on airplanes. I designed a calendar that can have us coming in on Sunday night and have us working through Friday night and then have a week back home in our community rather than this Tuesday through Thursday schedule, going back and forth. It doesn’t work for California, and it certainly doesn’t work for my colleagues from really underrepresented communities like Guam or the Mariana Islands or Alaska.

Bringing down the cost of childcare is a big part of this. The tax-free Dependent Care FSA amount is capped at $5,000. There is no infant care available in any state — much less than California — that offers child care for that much. Before I ran for Congress, every year, around this time of year, I would make that decision to set aside $5,000 with three kids as a single mother. That money ran out by March. Who thinks that you can get childcare for $5,000?

When I got to Congress, I did some research and found out the answer was Ronald Reagan. That was when that amount was last adjusted. Here we are championing and updating a program that Reagan put in place and we’re being told we can’t do it. This is the lack of imagination on the economy that we can’t afford. Our competitor nations are not investing in things like gender equity, women in STEM, universal pre-K, childcare or maternal health out of the kindness of their hearts. They’re doing it because it’s a smart, economic and social strategy. There’s nothing more expensive than that waste of human capital.

MC: Homelessness is a crisis in California. What would you do from Washington that hasn’t already been done to help our cities address this crisis?

Porter: We have a housing crisis writ large. Working people cannot afford to live in California. Students cannot afford housing while they study in California. Seniors cannot afford to live out their retirement in California. Homelessness, to me, is like the tip of the iceberg. It’s what is visible to those of us who are fortunate enough to have secure housing. But underneath that we have a much larger failure to invest in housing.

What I have seen in the last two decades, including in my work as a housing advocate in California, is the federal government pointing the finger down and saying housing is a state issue. But housing officials here tell you it’s a county issue, and county officials tell you it’s a city issue and round and round we go, not making the investments that we need to make.

The GI Bill was 80 years ago. Think about how incredibly transformative that investment in housing was in opening up homeownership to a whole generation that did not otherwise have it. The federal government hasn’t made that kind of big, imaginative investment in housing in the last 80 years, and it shows.

The fact is California’s biggest challenge is housing. That was true even before the recent attention on homelessness. And yet that issue barely registers in Washington, D.C. I’ll give you an example: In the United States Congress, unlike in the California Legislature, there isn’t even a housing committee. Housing is a subcommittee. The committee is banking, because in Washington, D.C. housing is just an engine to help Wall Street line its pockets. It’s not what it is for Californians, which is something that determines whether you’re going to have job opportunities, the kind of public education your kid is going to get, whether you’re going to have clean air and clean water, how long your commute is going to be and whether you’re going to have a secure retirement.

We need a senator that’s going to make it Washington’s top issue. We need more funding for Section 8. We need to increase supply by boosting housing and finance structures and we need to build more duplexes and ADU units. We need to boost on the supply side, not just by hoping that Wall Street will decide to do it or that builders will decide that somehow, magically, it’s more profitable to build duplexes than it is to build mansions, but by directing government financing that backs the building development we most need. Left to itself, we’ll just see more of what we’ve seen, which is housing prices rising many times faster than wages.

MC: This Congress is probably going to get the award for the Do-Nothing-ist Congress of all time. Do you believe that attitude and the contentiousness between parties is here to stay?

Porter: I think the contentiousness is, in part, because we have a Congress that is driven by party leaders whose job it is to drive that contentiousness in an effort to win over votes.

Most members will tell you they have friends on the other side of the aisle. I certainly do. For example, I just recently went to a briefing that I organized with Rep. Doug LaMalfa about the insurance industry’s withdrawal from California. One of the problems is we have a Washington in which party leaders do battle with each other. And the rank-and-file members who are most connected to wanting to solve problems on the ground, in their communities, do not have enough sway to bring ideas forward and across the finish line.

How do we restructure and think about Congress? The trend to pile so many things into bills actually stops us from having consideration and getting bipartisan support for smaller ideas within those bills that actually could pass on a bipartisan basis. But when it all gets thrown in together, then Washington, D.C. people just vote the party line on the bill because there are so many competing priorities within it. It’s a choice we make whether we in Washington conduct ourselves in such a way that helps the partisanship ratchet down versus ratchet up.

I represent a community right now in which about a third of my constituents are Republicans, about a third are Democrats and about a third or no party preference. That means I represent and sometimes earn the votes of people who don’t always agree with me. But I do that by being a straight talker, by being truthful about what the challenges are and being willing to hold anybody to account, whether that’s a member of my own party or a powerful CEO. If you’re not delivering for Californians, I’m going to call you out. And I think that has earned me the respect and the cooperation of members of both sides of the aisle. That’s something we need in California to get things done and to make all Californians feel like their representative is fighting for them.

MC: Who is your role model?

Porter: I would say Elizabeth Warren. I knew her when she was a law professor, and I was her student trying to get an A and worried I was going to get a B+. She hasn’t changed one bit. She’s still the same person she’s always been. Watching her transition into politics and keep her core of who she was convinced me, when I went to run, that I didn’t have to leave behind the me that I liked — the me that grew up on a farm in Iowa, the me that showed pigs, the me that drives a messy minivan, whose hair is not ever quite right. I didn’t have to leave that all behind to run for office.

Katie Porter was interviewed by opinion journalists at The Sacramento Bee, The Fresno Bee, The Modesto Bee, The Tribune in San Luis Obispo and Merced Sun-Star.