Brian Fitzpatrick (American politician)
Brian Kevin Fitzpatrick is an American politician who is a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving as the representative for Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district since 2017. The district, numbered as the 8th District during his first term, includes all of Bucks County, a mostly suburban county north of Philadelphia, as well as a sliver of Montgomery County.
A former FBI agent, he was elected in 2016 and took office on January 3, 2017. He was re-elected on November 6, 2018, to the newly redrawn 1st District.
Early life and education
Born in Philadelphia and raised in nearby Levittown, Pennsylvania, Fitzpatrick graduated from Bishop Egan High School in Fairless Hills in 1992. He graduated from La Salle University in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. In 2001, Fitzpatrick completed both a Master of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University and a Juris Doctor at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law.Career
Republican Fitzpatrick is a former Special Assistant United States Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation supervisory special agent in California. At the FBI, he served as a national supervisor for the Bureau's Public Corruption Unit, and led the agency's Campaign Finance and Election Crimes Enforcement program. During his time in the FBI, he spent time in Kiev, Ukraine, Mosul, Iraq and Washington, D.C. He was embedded with U.S. Special Forces as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.House of Representatives
Elections
2016
In 2016, Fitzpatrick ran for the open U.S. House of Representatives seat of his brother Mike Fitzpatrick, who retired from Congress to uphold a promise to limit himself to four terms.In the April 26, 2016, Republican primary, Fitzpatrick received 78.4% of the vote, defeating Andy Warren and Marc Duome. Meanwhile, Steve Santarsiero defeated Shaughnessy Naughton for the Democratic nomination, 59.8% to 40.2%. In the general election, Fitzpatrick received 54.4% of the vote, while Santarsiero received 45.6%.
2018
After a court-ordered redistricting, Fitzpatrick's district was renumbered as the 1st District. It remained largely unchanged from the old 8th, but absorbed a larger slice of central Montgomery County. According to Nate Cohn of The New York Times, the old 8th had been one of the more regularly drawn districts in a map that had been thrown out as an unconstitutional partisan Republican gerrymander. The new 1st was slightly more Democratic than its predecessor. Had it existed in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have carried it with 49 percent of the vote to Donald Trump's 47 percent. In contrast, Clinton and Trump finished almost tied in the old 8th, with Trump winning by 0.2 percentage points.In the Republican primary on May 15, 2018, he defeated Dean Malik by a margin of 68.85% to 31.15 percent. In the Democratic primary, Scott Wallace won with 55.97% of the vote, defeating Rachel Reddick, who tallied 35.85%, and Steve Bacher, who brought in 8.18%. In the general election, Fitzpatrick defeated Democratic nominee Scott Wallace by a margin of 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent. He carried Bucks County by 12,000 votes, more than his overall margin of 8,300 votes. Fitzpatrick thus became one of only three Republican U.S. Representatives to survive during the 2018 U.S. House elections in congressional districts that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, along with Congressmen John Katko and Will Hurd.
Political positions
In the first session of the 115th United States Congress, Fitzpatrick was ranked the third most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives by the Bipartisan Index, a metric created by the Lugar Center and Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy to assess congressional bipartisanship.GovTrack noted that Fitzpatrick introduced the most bills among freshman Representatives, and, of the 274 bills he cosponsored, 35% were introduced by a non-Republican legislator.
Tax reform
In December 2017, Fitzpatrick voted in favor of the Republicans' tax overhaul bill in a party-line vote.Climate change
At a September 2018 forum hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center and The Hill, Fitzpatrick highlighted man-made climate change as a serious issue. He stated that Republicans must "acknowledge reality and don't deny it." He is a member of the bipartisan congressional Climate Solutions Caucus and cointroduced the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act of 2018. He did not sponsor the 2019 version of the bill.Immigration
In 2017, Fitzpatrick was critical of President Obama's executive order establishing the DACA program, but said the immigration system was broken. In a 2018 debate, Fitzpatrick said that he supported a path to citizenship for DREAMers, but that "any immigration reform package has to deal with border security." In 2019, he voted for the American Dream and Promise Act, which included no new border security measures.Fitzpatrick opposed President Donald Trump's 2017 executive order to impose a temporary ban on entry to the U.S. to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. He stated that "the president's policy entirely misses the mark."
President Donald Trump
In July 2019, Fitzpatrick was one of four Republican House members to vote in support of a motion to condemn remarks by President Trump made on Twitter calling on "'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen who originally came from countries" that are described as failing to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." On December 18, 2019, Fitzpatrick voted against the impeachment of President Trump.Russia
In a 2018 debate, Fitzpatrick said that Russia held "by and large, sinister motives", noting that while he was stationed in Ukraine, twice Russia attempted to knock out the nation's electrical grids through cyber attacks.In July 2018, Fitzpatrick said that President Trump had been "manipulated" by Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the Helsinki Summit. Fitzpatrick said he was "frankly sickened by the exchange" between Trump and Putin. He criticized the "mixed signals" that the Trump administration was sending regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In April 2018, Fitzpatrick said that President Trump should stop attacking the FBI and allow Robert Mueller to complete his investigation, stating it was improper to "judge an institution based on the actions of a few bad actors."
Health care
Fitzpatrick opposed the American Health Care Act, a bill to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In a statement, Fitzpatrick said, "After considering the current healthcare bill in a thorough and deliberate manner, I have concluded that, although the American Health Care Act focuses on several much-needed reforms to our healthcare system, in its current form I cannot support this legislation". Fitzpatrick joined many of his Republican colleagues as well as every congressional Democrat in an effort to oppose the bill.On May 4, 2017, Fitzpatrick also voted against the second attempt to pass the American Health Care Act. In a statement, he said, "We saw what happened when healthcare reform – an issue impacting 1/5 of our economy – was rushed through Congress along extremely partisan lines in 2009," referring to the ACA in 2010.
On December 12, he took part in the Democratic bill to lower drug costs.
Narcotics trafficking
Fitzpatrick sponsored the International Narcotics Trafficking Emergency Response by Detecting Incoming Contraband with Technology Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in January 2018. The new law directs $15 million to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol to expand screening for fentanyl and opioids at the U.S. border.Gerrymandering
In September 2017, Fitzpatrick urged the U.S. Supreme Court to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering in the Gill v. Whitford case. He stressed that partisan redistricting had undermined the Founding Father's vision of the House of Representatives remaining the voice of the people.He was the only Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania who did not take part in a February 2018 lawsuit challenging a new district map drawn by Democrats. He explained that he opposes the drawing of congressional districts by elected officials of either party, saying instead that they should be drawn by independent, nonpartisan citizen panels.
LGBT rights
Fitzpatrick supports same-sex marriage. In 2019, he co-sponsored legislation to extend the Civil Rights Act protections to people regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2019, he voted for the Equality Act, granting protections to LGBT-identifying adults and minors and repealing Title IX.Term limits and congressional perks
In April 2018, Fitzpatrick led a bipartisan group of freshmen House members in an Oval Office meeting at which they discussed with President Trump a proposed constitutional amendment imposing congressional term limits.In May 2018, Fitzpatrick and Stephanie Murphy introduced H.R. 5946, the Fostering Accountability, Integrity, Trust, and Honor in Congress Act, that would "end certain special perks reserved for Members of Congress, enact a lifetime ban preventing former Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists, and withhold Members' paychecks if they fail to pass a budget on time."