Unlike some of her fellow freshmen, Representative Katie Porter of California has managed to escape the ire of the current occupant of the White House. While she isn’t exactly rushing to take part in the Squad’s frequent Twitter smackdowns with the president, she is on friendly terms with the four women who make up the most controversial clique in her class. She sits next to Rashida Tlaib in committee and recently wrote a joint letter with another Squad member, Ayanna Pressley, as well as Elizabeth Warren, on debt collection.

These women share many of the same priorities—Medicare for All, reproductive and LGBTQ rights, a desire to get corporate money out of politics (in 2018, while running in conservative Orange County, Porter refused to take PAC money)—but, today, she conveys cautious, considered pragmatism more often than idealism or militant fire.

Her background as a law professor, a textbook author, a consumer protection attorney who studied under Warren at Harvard, and a single mother of three has helped to equip her with an even-keel approach, an incisive analytical mind, and a boundless well of patience—qualities that have served her well during her customarily rigorous preparation for congressional hearings, which often begins around midnight, when she gets home from Capitol Hill.

From her position on the House Financial Services Committee, Porter has staged neatly surgical dissections of testimony. If she senses a lack of preparation, she approaches her target with all the languid menace of a coiled python. As witnesses like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Housing Secretary Ben Carson have discovered, when Porter strikes, it leaves a mark.

She was questioning Carson about REOs, a common real estate term, at a May 21 hearing on disparities in foreclosures, when he confused the term with Oreo cookies. “For me, it was like a student who just cannot get it,” she told me in July, lapsing into her professorial persona. “I’m trying to make the question easier and easier. (Sometimes, in the classroom, you’re, like, ‘What is your first name?’) You’re trying to find a question the student can answer.”