Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian Kevin Fitzpatrick (born December 17, 1973) is an American politician, attorney, and former FBI agent who has served as a U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania since 2017.

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.

Fitzpatrick is a former Special Assistant United States Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 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 Kyiv, Ukraine; Mosul, Iraq; and Washington, D.C. He was embedded with U.S. Special Forces as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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.

In the first session of the 116th United States Congress, Fitzpatrick was ranked first by the Bipartisan Index.

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.

On February 4, 2021, Fitzpatrick joined 10 other Republican House members voting with all voting Democrats to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her Education and Labor Committee and Budget Committee assignments in response to controversial political statements she had made.

On November 5, 2021, Fitzpatrick was among the 13 House Republicans who broke with their party and voted with a majority of Democrats for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill.

Fitzpatrick has aligned himself with anti-abortion stances.

A Republican, Fitzpatrick was elected in 2016.

In 2016, Fitzpatrick ran for the open U.S. House 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.

State Representative Steve Santarsiero defeated Shaughnessy Naughton for the Democratic nomination, 59.8% to 40.2%.

Fitzpatrick won the general election with 54.4% of the vote to Santarsiero's 45.6%.

After a court-ordered redistricting, Fitzpatrick's district was renumbered 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% of the vote to Donald Trump's 47%. In contrast, Clinton and Trump finished almost tied in the old 8th, with Trump winning by 0.2 percentage points."

Fitzpatrick was considered potentially vulnerable because his district had voted for Clinton in 2016, but he was reelected by a margin of 13 percentage points even as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden won Pennsylvania and carried the district by 6 points.

He was one of nine House Republicans to win in a district carried by Biden.

In 2017, he voted for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would prohibit abortions performed after 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in situations of incest or rape.

Fitzpatrick voted against the Women's Health Protection Act of 2021, which aimed to protect health-care professionals by establishing a statutory right for them to provide abortions.

After the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, allowing states to ban abortion, Fitzpatrick said in a statement to state legislatures, "Any legislative consideration must always seek to achieve bipartisan consensus that both respects a woman’s privacy and autonomy, and also respects the sanctity of human life. These principles are not mutually exclusive; both can and must be achieved."

Fitzpatrick was one of three Republicans to vote for H.R. 8297: Ensuring Access to Abortion Act of 2022.

Fitzpatrick also voted for H.R. 8373: The Right to Contraception Act.

After a court-mandated redistricting of Pennsylvania's congressional districts in 2018, Fitzpatrick has since been reelected to the redrawn 1st district.

He is running for re-election in 2024.

In the Republican primary on May 15, 2018, Fitzpatrick defeated Dean Malik, 68.85% to 31.15%.

Scott Wallace won the Democratic primary with 55.97% of the vote.

In the general election, Fitzpatrick defeated Wallace, 51.3% to 48.7%.

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 John Katko and Will Hurd.

His district, which was numbered the 8th district during his first term and the 1st district since 2019, includes all of Bucks County, a mostly suburban county north of Philadelphia, as well as a sliver of Montgomery County.

While abortion is not mentioned on his website, he co-signed a letter to President Donald Trump in 2019 that requested Trump veto any efforts to weaken anti-abortion policies.

Fitzpatrick ran for a third term in 2020.

In the Republican primary, he defeated Andrew Meehan, who ran as a more conservative candidate and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump.

The Democratic nominee was Ivyland City Councilwoman Christina Finello.