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. 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.
A Republican, Fitzpatrick was elected in 2016. After a court-mandated redistricting of Pennsylvania's congressional districts in 2018, Fitzpatrick has since been reelected to the 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
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.
U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
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%.
2018
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."
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.
2020
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. 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.
Tenure
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.