Armed with a whiteboard, rising freshman Katie Porter schools Congress
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, KAMALA HARRIS CALLED up Elizabeth Warren to ask for a tip. It was the messy aftermath of the Great Recession, and Harris, then California’s attorney general, needed a recommendation for someone who could handle the complicated job of overseeing the settlement money that big banks had paid for creating and bursting the infamous mortgage-backed-securities bubble.
“I said, ‘Talk to Katie Porter,’” Warren recalls telling Harris. Porter, who was then a University of California, Irvine, law professor, had been a student of Warren’s at Harvard Law School. Warren remembered her as “Fully prepared. Ready to go. Leaning forward. All systems go.”
Harris listened. In 2012, she appointed Porter to the role of California’s independent bank monitor, where the professor spent about two years overseeing
