When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, a California law professor named Katie Porter -- who had been expecting to join Clinton's transition team to advise on housing policy -- thought she would sit the next four years out of government.
She figured she'd wind up working for Elizabeth Warren, her former Harvard law school professor, or Kamala Harris, who in 2012 appointed Porter to be California's monitor of a nationwide mortgage settlement, to run for president.
Instead, she ran for Congress in 2018, winning a Republican seat and joining the "blue wave" of Democrats taking over the House.
Porter, 45, isn't part of "The Squad" -- the four-woman group of freshman progressives of color who were attacked this week by President Donald Trump. But she's emerged as a viral star when it comes to how banks and the government treat the working poor and puncturing Trump's claims about the economy.
