![]() ![]() In April 2018, when she was still a candidate in a tough primary, the down-to-earth Iowa-born professor sat across a table from me at a Washington, D.C., Marriott hotel and sobbed for a full hour as she recounted the story of her ex-husband’s physical and psychological abuse. The great irony is that during Porter’s campaign, she was forced to defend her fitness to serve in Congress as a single mother who survived domestic violence. She has arguably become one of the most effective members of the entire House of Representatives. Porter, though, has in her very first term managed to do in these hearings what lawmakers have been pretending to do in them for decades: speak truth to power, generate actual results, and enact change. Lawmakers occasionally “grill” witnesses in hopes of getting a few good soundbytes, but these events are mostly just kabuki theater the law writing and the votes happen elsewhere. The thing about congressional hearings, as anyone who’s covered them knows, is that they are generally pointless exercises in which nothing really happens. Two months later, she exposed Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s complete lack of knowledge about foreclosure properties when she used an acronym-REOs, or real estate owned properties-that he confused for oreo cookies. Last March, she skewered Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan over the bank’s defrauding of its customers, caught the bank in a lie with her signature prosecutorial questioning and forced Sloan to resign in shame two weeks later. Indeed, the last time a member made almost as much with her few minutes of time in a congressional hearing, it was also Katie Porter. “Rarely has a member made more with five minutes of his or her time,” tweeted Sam Stein, politics editor of The Daily Beast. It was an absolutely remarkable display of effective politics that left the Beltway stunned. "I think you're an excellent questioner, so my answer is yes," Redfield said. Redfield tried to squirm out of answering the question several times, saying he would “review it in detail” with the CDC and “work with HHS to see how to best operationalize it.” But Porter kept reclaiming her time and interjecting-“Not good enough” and “Yes or no?”-until the CDC chief eventually relented. After laying all that information out on a whiteboard at the coronavirus hearing, she asked Redfield pointedly: “Will you commit to the CDC, right now, using that existing authority to pay for diagnostic testing, free to every American, regardless of insurance?" She’d also found an obscure federal statute that gives the CDC chief the authority to immediately waive the cost of that test for everyone. She’d calculated the cost of the full battery of coronavirus tests to be $1,331-which is out of reach for many low-income patients. Robert Redfield, to use his legal authority to make testing for the virus free for all Americans. And it took her only five minutes of questioning at the coronavirus hearing on Thursday to compel the chief of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Having studied at Harvard Law under Elizabeth Warren, she has become exceptional at grilling powerful men in Congressional hearings and exacting results. So Porter took matters into her own hands. healthcare system is simply not set up to handle rapid, widespread testing during outbreaks: "It is a failing. ![]() Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress on Thursday that the U.S. ![]() Many Americans cannot even afford the out-of-pocket cost for the coronavirus test, which can add up to more than $1,300, much less the hospital stay. Germany, South Korea, and the UK quickly set up free drive-thru testing for their citizens, while Americans have been getting denied tests at the emergency room and then stuck with a $10,000 bill anyway. South Korea, for instance, has tested over 200,000 citizens, while as of Tuesday, the U.S., which had its first known case back on January 21, had only tested 6,500. The California congresswoman, a former law professor and single mother of three who flipped a GOP district in 2018, had watched as the United States fell far behind other countries in terms of responding to the pandemic. But as Trump’s administration badly mishandles the deadly coronavirus outbreak, Porter has unexpectedly emerged as a true hero in a spiraling crisis. Katie Porter, a freshman Democrat in Congress, couldn’t have known when she wore a batgirl Halloween costume to Donald Trump’s impeachment vote in October that she would soon have the chance to help rescue millions of Americans during a global pandemic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |