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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and it's so good to have you with us. Let's get to the politics. Votes for many of this week's local elections are still being counted, but it didn't take long for a theme to emerge in news coverage of the week's most prominent races.

Speaker 2: Democrats are waking up. This is a gut punch.

Speaker 3: The blame game among Democrats beginning. Some pointing to the failure to pass President Biden's multi-trillion dollar spending plan.

Speaker 4: I think what they have to do is look at last night as a blaring red siren.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Lower than expected approval ratings for President Biden and the party's failure to pass the reconciliation package were two of the reasons cited for the Democrats' underwhelming performances in Virginia and New Jersey. Here is president Biden on Wednesday facing questions from a reporter about his role in the Democrats' loss in Virginia.

Kristen Welker: Do you take some responsibility and do you think that Terry McAuliffe would have won if your agenda had passed before election day?

President Biden: I think it should have passed before election day. I'm not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out and the red districts who were Trump voters, but maybe maybe.

Kristen Welker: You won the sate by 10 points [unintelligible 00:01:25]

President Biden: I know we did, but also I was running against Donald Trump.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There's already been plenty of finger-pointing. Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, argued that passing a more progressive reconciliation package is not what the party's base wants. She told The New York Times, "Nobody elected president Biden to be FDR." To start today's show, we're going to talk with another house Democrat who says her party's electoral problems aren't because some on the left are pushing ambitious social safety net policies, instead, her diagnosis is that the Democrats need to build trust with voters.

Katie Porter: My name is Katie Porter. I represent California's 45th congressional district.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Congresswoman Porter is the deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Maybe her Twitter bio describes her best as, "The minivan-driving single mom, law professor, consumer advocate, usually carrying a whiteboard and always bringing the receipts." We started off by speaking about an issue that Congresswoman Porter has been a vocal advocate for. Childcare.

Katie Porter: We are at a 30 year low in women's participation in the workforce and that is a result both of the pandemic, but also of a longer running problem with the affordability of childcare. Childcare costs have risen 1000% in recent years. Faster even than things like housing and healthcare. Even before the pandemic, childcare for example, surpassed housing as the biggest expense for California families. We need to understand that childcare is both an issue at the kitchen table for families who are trying to make ends meet, but also a big issue for our economy that needs to make sure that we have everybody who has contributions to make to our economy, able to go to work.

Congress is-- our bill, our proposal here is that make sure that families wouldn't pay more than 7% of their incomes toward childcare and also try to increase that supply so childcare is easier to find.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're thinking about the childcare question, something we've been thinking and talking a lot about on the show, can you also maybe expand for me the ways that's connected to other aspects of family needs? Maybe I'm a sandwich generation person, maybe also talking a bit here about elder and senior care, then also those times maybe when one has very young children, sometimes 0 to 6 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks, other ways also that we can create a social safety net for folks who aren't yet ready to go back to work.

Katie Porter: Absolutely. Paid leave is smart and strong economic policy. If we're going to be competitive in the global economy, we need to get to where our competitor nations have long been with regard to paid family leave. While this is often associated with the birth of a child and the time off for women who have had those babies, the truth is that paid family leave helps protect both men and women, all different kinds of workers against things that we know will happen to some families some of the time. It could be an elderly relative who is sick, who needs that care, and the ability of that relative to get that care in-home with someone taking paid leave.

The pandemic was a real reminder of the importance of doing paid leave but the reality is, for decades now, the United States has failed to act as virtually every other country in the world has. I strongly support the US doing it. Sometimes people say to me, "Well, I don't have a child. I don't need paid leave. I'm not planning on-- my family is all grown." What I want to point out to people is, paid leave is not just about what you do with it. It's about making sure that your colleagues who you like and who are part of your team at work can stay in the workplace, can stay connected, and that your company that you work for, retains their talent to be globally competitive and growing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In that response, you've taken us to a bit of a different place, which is a question of political culture and a way in which we think about caring both for ourselves, our own households, families and neighborhoods, but also a sense of broader connection to our neighbors in the broader sense of neighbors within our districts and our nation. How are you feeling about those kinds of social ties and our sense of collective responsibility towards one another?

Katie Porter: I think it's really important that Congress emphasize and explain to people that policies are not about doing something for someone and leaving someone else behind. Instead, these policies are aimed at making sure that we have a strong and stable globally competitive economy that gives everybody who wants to work hard an opportunity to get ahead. I think too often, people have this sense that Congress is only fighting for these people or those people.

In fact, what we should be trying to do and what I pride myself on trying to do, is advanced policies that will help everybody because I've never met anyone, no American, no constituent, Republican or Democrat, young, old, white, brown or Black, has ever said that they want anything other than that strong economy. I think we have to help anchor these policies not just in who gets help, but in what is helped, and the what here is our economy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In thinking about what Congress is doing and moving forward, I think we have to talk about the reconciliation bill, which feels very stuck. I guess I'm wondering at this moment, surely, something is going to pass and it's probably going to be historically relevant, large, impactful, yet I wonder if there's any way for it to feel a win or if at this point it will always feel like so much was removed from that original top line.

Katie Porter: Well, as a mom, I'll make an analogy here. When you're pregnant, you're waiting at nine months, and you're trying to deliver that baby, you think to yourself, "I'm never doing this again. I don't think it'll ever come out. I'm never going to survive this process." You do, and you go on to celebrate and enjoy that experience. I think that's what this is like. This is the tough stuff, we're in those tough moments, but I feel really, really good about these bills, about what they're going to do and the fact that they are going to lift up our entire economy and give us a stable foundation, not just for a few months, which is what we've had to do over and over again during the pandemic.

Congress has had to pass emergency bills like the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan. These bills are going to put our economy in a strong place for decades to come. We will not only feel better when we get these bills passed and signed into law and I am absolutely confident that's going to happen, but also that we'll continue for years to come to see the benefits of these bills.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there anything that's currently out that if you had a magic wand you would make it the priority to put back in?

Katie Porter: I think there's no doubt that there are problems that we face that we just couldn't tackle in this bill. Reconciliation has limits on what you can and cannot do. For example, I'm really committed to campaign finance reform, voting rights, making sure that we're protecting our democracy so that everybody, regardless of their political opinion, is able to be heard and that's not drowned out by special interest money. We can't do that through the reconciliation process. That's not what reconciliation is for. It's for items that affect the budget. Absolutely, there's a lot of work that remains to be done. I would put voting rights and democracy reform, campaign finance reform right at the very top of the next set of issues we have to work on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're here at the start of November and clearly the election on Tuesday, it was not the single headline, best news that many Democrats may have wanted, but I'm wondering if you think the assessment of Tuesday as a warning bell for Democrats is a fair assessment.

Katie Porter: I think a lot about what I see as the fundamental political problem in this country, which is not a partisan one, which is that people have trouble trusting their government. That's particularly, by the way, true of the Federal Government. I think that we need to be demonstrating over and over and over again, both in how we communicate and how we do our job, both in the bills we pass and how we conduct oversight, which is a passion of mine, that people can trust us to improve their lives, to fight for them, to understand their concerns.

I think one of the reasons we often see as we did on Tuesday, these kinds of swings back and forth, or these kinds of efforts to, "Well, we went toward Democrats, now we're going toward Republicans, back to Democrats," is because people really have trouble trusting either party to deliver for them. I think that's the real mission of the Democratic Party, is to say that that D stands for delivering. That is what I think we're going to do with this infrastructure bill, with these reconciliation bills.

We have to recognize that there are a lot of decades of mistrust in Washington to fight for people rather than for big corporations and the wealthy. We have to work overtime to change that, or we're going to keep seeing these back and forths like we saw on Tuesday.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there a key strategy for building that trust?

Katie Porter: I often say to people who say to me, "We need a message. We need a message. We need to be better at messaging," the reality is there is no message that any politician can spout off or tweet or come on TV and say that begins to compare with actually seeing your life improve. For me, as a mom who really struggles to pay for childcare, I want to see that actual policy. As somebody who was really hurt by the Trump Tax Plan that made it impossible for me to deduct my taxes in California, I want to see that policy change.

I think that the reality is there's been a tough period getting to these bills, but when people start seeing things change, they feel better. I think a great example and a powerful reminder of that is the way the Biden Administration has pushed out vaccinations and made them more available. I'm taking my daughter to get vaccinated the day I get back from Washington, DC. I look to the Biden Administration and say, "Thank you for helping me to keep my daughter safe." I think that's the kind of real-life moment that gives trust in government.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It is on our weekend plans for our seven-year-old as well. Many of us are smiling about what feels like moving into a safer space for our young people. Within the context of thinking about that D as delivering, do you think that progressives have been unfairly labeled as D meaning difficult?

Katie Porter: We're at a strong place right now where the progressives, I think, are really leading the caucus towards supporting these bills. I think we feel like we had a chance to fight for things. We got them in, strong environmental policies to protect our planet, for example. I think that we're at a point where what we want to do now is be able to see these things in our communities. There's no doubt that there was lots of people who--

I don't know a single member of Congress, Democrat, or Republican, who isn't, at this point, wanting to get these bills in the rearview mirror. Some of them, of course, are going to oppose them. The Democrats are going to support them. I think that the progressives and moderates have a shared commitment to delivering on the president's agenda. I think he's done a marvelous job of making clear that we are fighting for the American People. That's the identity that we need to have, not our ideological or caucus identity, but our identity as people who deliver for American families.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're a member of the House, but you clearly represent a district and particularly Orange County in California. Can you talk to us a bit about holding responsible and accountable oil companies for the kinds of environmental degradation that we've seen like the spill that recently happened off the coast in Orange County?

Katie Porter: One of the exciting things in the Build Back Better Act are changes to offshore and onshore oil and gas leasing that will help us hold polluters accountable for the harms that they cause. Right now, companies do not pay enough in bonds so that when it is time to decommission, when there is a spill, they don't have enough money, and they walk away from these liabilities often using bankruptcy and leaving taxpayers on the hook.

One of the exciting things in the Build Back Better Act actually is legislation to do exactly that, to reform our oil and gas leasing system, to make sure that when companies drill on public land, for example, that taxpayers get their fair share, and that companies who are making profits off doing this drilling are actually paying for the full cost of that drilling, including all of the cleanup. Absolutely, remain very concerned about what happened in Orange County, look forward to continuing the work I began with the field hearing I had in Irvine on the oil spill.

I think there's a longer-term structural problem here, which is just we see over and over again companies make these messes, and they leave them for others to clean up. I wouldn't take that from my kids, I'm not going to take that from big oil.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talk a lot about being a mom. I think, in some ways, we can see that as warm, fuzzy, friendly, but moms often have to be tough and sometimes have to take a fair bit of criticism. I'm wondering how you have experienced this particular political moment, which can be, in fact, pretty brutal, I think, to all elected officials but maybe particularly to women.

Katie Porter: My children are definitely my toughest constituents, no doubt about that. Sometimes people will say, "I don't know how you get through the day in Washington, DC." I think to myself about what my days are like dealing with my kids. I don't know. It all just seems pretty tough to me. I think it's important that we have people in government who understand what real Americans' lives are like.

When my kids say, "You forgot to fill out my form. The pharmacy lost my prescription." These are real problems that people have. I think it's important that we elect people, both men and women, who represent those real experiences. No doubt that this is not an easy time to be an elected official. I would say this is not an easy time to be an American. I think about what our nurses and our teachers, our first responders, our essential workers have gone through right now. I think parents of young children, like me, are also in that category, who this pandemic has been a hard road for. The solution to that is to make sure that we do better for all American families going forward.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've said before that teachers changed your life. I am, at my core, a teacher. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Katie Porter: Teachers were so important to me, both in terms of giving me the opportunity educationally, to earn a living, to be able to support my family, especially as a single parent, but also in terms of showing me that information is really the start of being able to have debate and to have disagreement. One of the things I really try to do as an elected official is give constituents information when I'm in a hearing and I'm using a whiteboard. What I'm really trying to do is get everyone on the same page so that then we can begin to have that back and forth. I can get answers for my constituents, for the American people.

I think a lot of what I think about when being an elected official, I don't feel it's that different than my old job as a teacher. This is really a teaching and learning job. I learn from my colleagues in Washington, from witnesses who come to testify, from my constituents about what's happening. Then, my goal is to teach, to bring what I know into the legislative process, to help craft legislation, to teach my constituents what's in these bills that are going to affect their lives. I think that mindset that elected officials should be facilitating information in our democracy, and then allowing people to make up their own minds.

I think particularly as someone who represents a district with about equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, I've found that, "Let me tell you what I know," is really the right way to begin conversations and to set people on a more civil path to having that political debate.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Every good teacher knows that class goes better when everybody has done the reading. What would be on your syllabus for the American People right now? What one or two texts do you think might help us to see one another or hear one another more clearly?

Katie Porter: Oh, that's a really good question. I read so much. It's hard for me to even think about answering that, but I do think that we're going to be working hard to produce easy-to-digest information for people about what's in this bill. I think there's a tendency when people hear that it's a big bill, or it's taking a long time, to assume that they could never understand what's in it. It's too complicated. I think it's our job to create really easy to get at pieces of information.

I also think looking back at our country's history is always helpful. People say, "It's such a scary time to be an elected official." We've had a lot of-- obviously January 6th and other challenges in our democracy. Looking back at our country's history, that the House floor has long been a divisive place. I think being reminded of that in times like this, that our democracy has been through challenges and that we've emerged on the other side is always helpful.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For little girls who might be watching, who are 14, 15, 16 years old and beginning to think about, "Hmm. In my adult life, what are the things I might want to do?" Would you encourage them to jump into the political arena? Would you tell them to shy away? Would you have advice for them on it?

Katie Porter: I think that everyone should find a path to being engaged in our democracy, and that's going to look different for different people. Some people are going to run for office, some people are going to volunteer in their communities, some people are going to participate in our democracy by voting or by being part of organizations that work on issues. I often say to people, "If you're looking at someone else, and you're thinking that person is democracy, you're not looking in your own mirror."

Each one of us has a role to play in this process. I think particularly for young girls, for people of color who maybe have not been represented in this country, it's really important that they all step up. The way of the past that this job was done by people who were largely older, wealthier, white men is not the way that this job is going to be done in the future. That changes when people step up and get involved in the process.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Congresswoman Katie Porter of California, thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Katie Porter: Thank you.

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