On June 17, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, posted a video on Twitter
telling her constituents that she had decided to support the impeachment of Donald
Trump “after weeks of study, deliberation, and conversations with Orange County
families.”
In doing so, Porter became the first member of the Democrats’
large “red-to-blue” class that flipped control of the House of Representatives from
Republican control in the 2018 midterm elections.
In an interview with the Santa Barbara Independent during
a visit to Santa Barbara on October 12, Porter talked about the reasons for her
decision, along with some thoughts about the 2020 election. The transcript is lightly
edited for clarity and length.
Why do you support Trump’s impeachment rather than
waiting for the 2020 election? I think
there are two different issues.
One is, I think we should support impeachment because we have
a president who has repeatedly broken the law and put his personal interest and
his political interest ahead of this country’s interest.
A separate issue is defeating Trump at the ballot box in 2020.
Which to me is not only about upholding the rule of law in terms of our democracy
in a free and fair election but is also about making sure that people understand
that they are the ultimate repository of power in this country.
And so, the impeachment process is going to move forward through
representatives in the House and the Senate. But the people of this country are
going to make their mark against President Trump when they go to the ballot box
in November 2020, so both of those are fights worth having.
You have little kids. What, specifically, do you fear for
their futures if he gets a second term?
I think that if the president is elected to a second term, the chance that
we are drawn into one or more wars that put the lives of our children and grandchildren
at risk is very high.
And this concern is only deepened by what’s happened in the last
few days with the Turkish government, and the president encouraging and recently
setting the stage for the Turkish government to result in the release of ISIS militants.
So the world is less safe today than it was last week; we are
less safe as a country this week than we were last week because of the president’s
actions, and I’m concerned about continued instability on the world stage, meaning
that literally my children and your grandchildren will be fighting in foreign wars
that could have been avoided by strong diplomatic relationships.
How would you characterize the level of corruption in the
administration? High.
How high? Higher than Richard Nixon? Oh, you probably
weren’t even around then…. (Laughs.)
I was, like, barely born then.
I think that there are multiple aspects on the corruption front.
One is the corruption of this president in particular and the
fact that we need to have some more safeguards against this kind of self-dealing,
against this kind of corruption. It’s in some ways amazing that a country like ours,
with a democracy like ours, has survived this long without someone like President
Trump.
One of the things I sometimes tell my constituents when they
say, you know, we aren’t doing enough to hold the president accountable, is that
our Constitution didn’t actually contemplate a president who had this level of disregard
for his patriotic duty.
We simply don’t have all the tools or regulations or rules in
place that we need to. So I think there are lessons we take from the Trump presidency
in terms of how do we think about moving forward with pro-democracy initiatives
to safeguard against the next person like President Trump that may be coming down
the line, the next person who fails to respect the law.
You were the first 2018 red-to-blue member to call for
impeachment. Why did you reject Speaker Pelosi’s original argument that doing
so could endanger the Democrats’ House majority? I think that the most important thing you can
do for your constituents is to be true to what you think is right for this country,
what you think is best for the United States. So I support impeachment because I
believe we have a president who is [trampling] on the rule of law in ways that will
damage this country irreparably if we don’t hold him to account.
So ultimately it wasn’t a political question for me. It was a
question of right and wrong. There are always political consequences to decisions
you make, but those political consequences shouldn’t drive your decision.
Second, I was part of a big group of people elected to Congress
to stand up to this president and to be a check and balance. We asked voters who’d
never voted before, people who infrequently vote and who don’t believe that their
vote makes a difference, to turn out in races like mine, and they did.
What they deserve back is a leader who puts democracy first.
Somebody who’s not afraid to make hard political choices to do what’s right. So
I think it’s important to stand up for what you believe in.
The Speaker’s job is to bring the whole group of us forward,
and she can’t do that if each of us individually isn’t signaling to her what the
right values are that we should be fighting for.
Does it matter if the House impeaches and the Senate
doesn’t convict Trump? Impeachment is
a slender reed in the Constitution. There’s 10 words — there’s no 300-page handbook.
So sometimes people say, ‘Why aren’t you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that?’
The Constitution doesn’t actually give us much of a playbook
here. It just gives us the injunction to honor its words, which is what we’re trying
to do.
But whether we do it through an impeachment investigation or
articles of impeachment, whether we actually need to relieve the president to make
the change — that, I think, is much harder to parse.
But I’ll tell you, standing up for what is right earns you the
respect on both sides of the aisle and people who don’t even believe in the system
at all because they see too few leaders.
In your speech, you suggested that you support the
strategic argument in the 2020 race that Democrats should rely on increasing
their base rather than persuading voters in the middle. Why? I will say that I think there are differences
in different races. I have colleagues who won in deeply Trump districts where the
voters are moderate in their views. In a district like that, it makes sense to have
a moderate candidate.
But the idea that the only way to flip a seat, the only way to
make change, is by almost invisibly incremental change is not true, and I’m proof
of that in my race.
So as we think about 2020 and we think about the presidential,
we need to think about how not just to keep these seats but how to make sure we
hold them in the long term.
We have to recognize that the millennial generation is soon to
be the largest base of voters in this country, and this is a generation whose experience
with elections started with Al Gore and hanging chads and has only gotten worse.
This is a generation that has only ever known unlimited dark
political spending. Who only have ever known a world in which corporations have
equal free-speech rights as people, so we have to give those younger voters confidence
that we will fight for them and that we will change this corrupt system.
Things like not taking corporate PAC money, things like standing
up to corruption, things like calling out wrongdoing, whether it’s a corporate witness
or the President of the U.S., give those people confidence that their vote might
count.
And that, I think, is the single most unifying common thing that
we have to be doing across this country today.
The election may come down to Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania, the three states where Trump won the electoral votes that gave
him the presidency. Can Elizabeth Warren win there? I have not yet made a public endorsement.
But I think Elizabeth Warren’s personal experience as a young
mother, as a special education teacher, as somebody who went through a divorce and
was a single mom, who faced discrimination in the workplace, who struggled to find
childcare, her whole life story — her parents barely held it together; her father
had a heart attack — her life story is a story of opportunity for working-class
Americans.
So I have every confidence that when’s she’s able to tell that
story, this is someone who connects on a deeply personal level about the struggles
that families face every single day.