Katie Porter is an expert in studying bankruptcies and financial transactions, and she lets it be seen every time she bankrupts powerful figures during questioning.
The congresswoman even uses props,
a white board that makes the effort
of someone who previously helped defend families before banks and financial agencies
more educational
.
(Porter has said that she also learned to make her witnesses nervous because of her experience teaching students who came to the classroom without having recovered from the party.)
The most recent target of the questioning was Mark Alles, formerly CEO of the pharmaceutical company Celgene, who appeared on September 30 in a legislative investigation into price and stock speculation to block rivals that make generics.
"Do you know what this number represents?" He asked Alles, in an interrogation that was viewed millions of times and retweeted by thousands of Twitter accounts.
After the question, he
proceeded to demonstrate math to the executive: what he has earned in bonuses versus what the company charges cancer patients.
That viral moment is just one of many in the year Porter has been on Capitol Hill.
Interrogations that bother
Armed with her blackboard to do addition and subtraction, Porter has cornered the criticized director of the Postal Service, Louis DeJoy, to admit that he does not even know how much it costs to mail a postcard.
Porter
upset Mark Zuckerberg
,
Facebook's
millionaire CEO, who ended up admitting that he couldn't do the job of content moderation for which the social network pays contractors a pittance.
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Katie Porter in October 2019 during Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the House Financial Services Committee.Reuters
The congresswoman exhibited the Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson, when she asked him about the term REO, a mechanism for foreclosure, and he replied that he was talking about Oreo cookies.
It showed that the head of the Office for Consumer Financial Protection, an official who was appointed to the position despite having almost no experience in consumer finance, did not seem to know how to calculate the amount that a citizen would have to pay in annual APR interest. If he took out a loan of 200 dollars.
And Porter managed in May to get a representative from the coronavirus task force to
commit to making COVID-19 testing free
even for those without health insurance.
Bankers and lobbyists
admit that testifying before her is challenging
because it breaks down her arguments in a very "intellectual" way, they told The Washington Post last year.
On the road to making financiers nervous, Porter has also managed to make appearances normally seen as bland attract a lot of stares and
go viral on social media.
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" I
try to
really ask instead of making speeches, because
the
American people what they want to
know is: Are these witnesses are really being honest
?" Said Porter media about how they
operate during hearings, for which prepares your files computer between 70 to 150 pages of information related to the given topic.
Past and future
Porter left her position as a law professor, with a career in which she wrote textbooks on consumer advocacy and investigated foreclosure fraud, to run for Congress two years ago.
It was partially inspired by her former faculty professor, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Porter won in a district that had been a Republican for more than 30 years, and is now part of a
record number of Democratic and Republican women on Capitol Hill.
She is also a single mother of three children.
He has said that asking questions of a witness does not even compete with the difficulty of dealing with his children "and that is when they are behaving well."
The director of the Postal Service testifies in the Senate and defends his first months in office
Aug. 21, 202000: 28
The California attorney is part of the Oversight and Reform Commission, as well as the Financial Services Committee.
It is in these positions that Porter, with his blackboard, has asked various people in power uncomfortable questions.
Now that his questions have increasingly drawn the attention of certain Americans, there are even those who joke about how Porter should prepare if he wants to run for president: with the white board as vice president.
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