The Republican from Bucks County is on a crusade to crush the roots of America’s toxic partisan politics: the parties themselves.
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Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick / Photograph by Colin Lenton
Brian Fitzpatrick, the moderate Republican from Bucks County, has been ranked as the most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives — the member of Congress, in other words, who’s most likely to reach across the aisle and look for common ground with the other side.
But bipartisanship, Fitzpatrick is telling me one day as we sit across a table from each other, isn’t his ultimate goal. No, what he actually dreams of for America is nonpartisanship — the complete elimination of political parties. And his inspiration in this endeavor is none other than the Father of Our Country.
George Washington, in his farewell address in 1796, very prophetically predicted that the two-party system was going to be the biggest threat, or put the biggest strain, on democracy,” Fitzpatrick says. “What our founding fathers envisioned is — you need the public to participate actively; you need them to be engaged and informed and vote. And our country needs to be unified against a common external threat. If the threat becomes internal and the divide becomes internal, the system of government was not really designed for that.”
It’s a bright afternoon in early December, and Fitzpatrick, looking lean and fit a couple of weeks before his 52nd birthday, is in his Capitol Hill office. The space is a little cluttered, but it’s adorned with dozens of nicely framed photos: Fitzpatrick with actress Diane Lane (a fellow animal rights supporter). Fitzpatrick with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Fitzpatrick with his late brother, Mike, who represented Bucks County in Congress before Brian and passed away from cancer in 2020.
I’m here during a particularly busy period. The issue of Ukraine, of which Fitzpatrick is a huge supporter, is heating up as the Trump administration attempts to negotiate a peace treaty — a treaty Fitzpatrick fears will give away the store to Russia. Meanwhile, he’s been actively engaged in trying to extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits, which have made health insurance more affordable for millions of middle-class Americans. But even with his packed schedule, Fitzpatrick has found time to talk with me about his favorite subject: how much the American political system totally sucks.
“I could talk for hours about this, but the two-party system needs to go away,” he continues. “We need to move to a coalition government and not the way it is now, which is a zero-sum, all-or-nothing game. In the House, if you get 218 votes on a bill, you get everything. And if you get 217 votes, you get nothing. Well, a 218–217 breakdown is representative of a very divided electorate that wants compromise, but they don’t get it. And that’s why we have this great, cavernous divide.”
To his credit, Fitzpatrick — now in his fifth term representing one of the most purple districts in America — has done more than just talk about what ails American democracy. He’s acted, repeatedly introducing reforms that would increase cooperation and compromise while modeling bipartisanship himself. (See: “most bipartisan member of the House,” above.)
The problem? There are two, actually. The first is that Fitzpatrick hasn’t really gotten much traction in this effort to upend the American political system — a fact he acknowledges and attributes to, well, the American political system. “We’re fighting the parties, right?” he says. “The parties don’t want it because it takes power from them.”
Problem number two: Until such time as Fitzpatrick can pull off his political revolution, he’s stuck operating in the world as it currently exists — which, as we shall see, creates no shortage of complicated situations for him.
One of these situations came last summer, with President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the massive piece of legislation that encompassed literally hundreds of proposed items, from making permanent Trump’s 2017 tax cuts to slashing safety-net programs. When the final version of the bill came up for a vote in July, Fitzpatrick defiantly voted no, one of only two Republicans to oppose it. His “nay” not only caught House leadership by surprise — mid-vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity he was looking for Fitzpatrick — but also ultimately earned the ire of Trump.
He’s had opportunities to show real bipartisanship and failed. He’s bipartisan when his party allows him to be bipartisan.” — Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, Fitzpatrick’s Democratic opponent
Not that any of this helped Fitzpatrick score any points with Democrats in his district, who noted that his no vote was essentially inconsequential — Republicans had enough yes votes that the One Big Beautiful Bill passed anyway. In contrast, those Democrats will tell you, when a version of the bill came before the House a month earlier, Fitzpatrick had not only voted for it, but had effectively put it over the top. The final tally was … wait for it … 218 to 217.
It was a perfect example, Dems say, of “the two faces of Fitz” — on one hand preaching consensus and cooperation, on the other reliably siding with his fellow Republicans when their agenda is on the line. “He’s had opportunities to show real bipartisanship and failed,” says Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, a Democrat. “He’s bipartisan when his party allows him to be bipartisan.”
Fitzpatrick, not surprisingly, bristles when I mention such criticisms. “Are these people that would ever compliment me on anything?” he asks. (Probably not. Harvie is challenging Fitzpatrick for his seat.)
Indeed, as if to show his critics just how wrong they are about him, two weeks after my chat with Fitzpatrick in his office, he does something very much in defiance of Republican Party leaders: He and three other moderate Republicans join up with Democrats to force a House floor vote on those expiring ACA tax credits. The move doesn’t guarantee that the credits will be extended — the Senate has already shot down an extension, and there’s skepticism they’ll even take it up again — but it’s certainly not toeing the party line.
In many respects, Brian Fitzpatrick seems to come from an earlier era in American life, when virtues like patriotism and community service and civility were more celebrated. The youngest of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family, he became an Eagle Scout, then a certified EMT. Inspired by 9/11, he opted to use his law and MBA degrees (both from Penn State) not in the private sector but in the FBI, ultimately spending time in Iraq and Ukraine, where he rooted out bad guys and promoted democracy. Fitzpatrick’s quest for bipartisanship — or maybe, one day, nonpartisanship — is of a piece with all that, an effort, perhaps, to bring back an America that seemed to be a little nicer and more cooperative and work a little better.
Of course, not for nothing, getting rid of political parties would also make his life a helluva lot easier.
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A couple of weeks before I sat with Fitzpatrick in his office, I watched from the cheap seats as he slid into a subcommittee hearing a few minutes late. Fitzpatrick is a busy guy — always hustling from place to place. In addition to sitting on two House committees (Ways and Means and Intelligence), he’s a member of 39 different House caucuses and task forces, co-chairing 19 of them. (They include the Ukraine Caucus, the Disabilities Caucus, and — looking at you, Diane Lane — the Animal Protection Caucus. Among the many bills he introduced last year was the Kangaroo Protection Act of 2025.)
Not that Fitzpatrick missed much in this particular hearing. Though the subject was nominally nonideological — the session was titled “Modernizing Care Coordination to Prevent and Treat Chronic Disease” — it took, oh, about a minute and a half for partisan bickering to break out. Democrats sniped that it was futile to talk about coordinating health care when Republicans were gutting it; Republicans countered that Obamacare was the work of Satan himself. (Okay, it’s possible I exaggerate the GOP position. But that was the tone.) When it came time for Fitzpatrick to speak, though, he didn’t take the bait either way, instead asking the witnesses a couple of intelligent questions that were actually related to the subject of the hearing.
Fitzpatrick isn’t shy about criticizing how messed up the current iteration of Congress is. Not only does our 21st-century information ecosystem encourage division, he tells me, but bloody partisanship is emphasized the minute you arrive on Capitol Hill. He notes that after new representatives are elected but before they’re sworn in, they all go to a program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, with Democrats and Republicans intermingling in an intimate, informal, no-labels kind of way. “But the second you get to Washington, they divide you physically on the floor,” Fitzpatrick says. Separate retreats. Separate conferences. “Because [party leaders] want to control the show. They don’t like it when we reach across the aisle.”
In Fitzpatrick’s dream world, those separate teams wouldn’t exist. Instead, all elected officials would be independents, free to seek out like-minded colleagues issue by issue. Want to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans? Team up with representatives who want to do the same thing. Want to hike defense spending? Find a different pack of colleagues who believe in doing that. If you take away the party identifiers, he reasons, you’d have real debates about the real problems the country faces — and that would lead to real solutions.
While Fitzpatrick knows that version of democracy might be a distant dream, he has, as I noted, attempted to push back on the us-versus-them ethos that currently defines Congress, starting with a series of legislative and Constitutional reforms he’s repeatedly introduced. He believes, for example, that one of the biggest reasons for our current lack of bipartisanship is the anxiety members feel over being primaried; neither Democrats nor Republicans want to compromise on issues because they fear a more ideologically pure candidate from their home district will call them out as a traitor and run against them in a primary. And since the people who vote in primaries also tend to be ideologically pure, guess who wins those races?
To counter that, Fitzpatrick — who, I should note, has survived fringe primary challenges every time he’s run — has introduced legislation that would effectively force states to have open primaries, letting independents (currently barred from voting in primaries in more than half the states) have a say in whom each party nominates. If independents voted, he argues, members of Congress would actually be incentivized to embrace compromise and centrism. Fitzpatrick has also crafted bills that would end gerrymandering (nonpartisan commissions would draw congressional districts) and impose term limits on members of Congress.
Brian Fitzpatrick with fellow congressman (and Democrat) Tom Suozzi of New York / Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Meanwhile, in his own legislative work, he’s regularly championed bipartisanship and developed a reputation as someone willing to work with his congressional colleagues. Another one of the caucuses Fitzpatrick leads is the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of nearly 50 Democrats and Republicans who meet not only to look for common ground on issues, but to build trust and cooperation across the aisle. (Fitzpatrick has visited the districts of Democrats Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Tom Suozzi of New York, and they’ve visited his.)
Finally, there are the instances when he has bucked his own party’s leadership and voted with Democrats. The first time came in 2017, just a few months after Fitzpatrick arrived in D.C. One of Donald Trump’s biggest first-term priorities was the wholesale repeal of Obamacare; Fitzpatrick was against repeal, and he told party leaders that. At which point the pressure campaign began.
“It was absolutely brutal,” he says of the succession of people who leaned on him. “It started with the deputy whip, and then the whip, and then the majority leader, and then the speaker, and then a separate meeting with the speaker, majority leader, whip, and deputy whip together. Then the vice president, then members of the administration, and then the president. And I had to say, no, no, no, no, no.”
Now, it’s worth mentioning that, even with all of Fitzpatrick’s noes, the bill repealing Obamacare still managed to pass the House; it failed only when it got to the Senate, where John McCain gleefully issued the deciding vote against it. This raises the issue that Democrats most often bring up when they weigh in on Fitzpatrick: that for all his talk of bipartisanship, he rarely casts a vote that makes a difference.
Over the years, for instance, Fitzpatrick has broken with Republicans and joined Democrats in supporting, among other things, gun control legislation, LGBTQ rights, and the CHIPS Act — but in all those cases, the bills were going to pass whether he supported them or not. As one Democratic member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation has put it: “He’s always with us — when we don’t need him.”
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Growing up in Bucks County, Fitzpatrick idolized his brother Mike, who was 10 years his senior and everything Brian wanted to be. “He was the cool guy, and I just — I emulated him. Like, he got his hair cut a certain way, and I did the same thing. He would buy a pair of sneakers; I’d want the same. I was that annoying younger brother, but I just looked up to him.”
Fitzpatrick talks warmly about his childhood in general. While his family didn’t have much money — his mother stayed home, his father was a traveling salesman, the brood made do with one car — “we always had an appreciation for what we had.” He raves about life in Levittown, the tight-knit Lower Bucks community that was literally the prototype for suburban, postwar American life. “It was just a great, magical place to grow up, and a magical time to do it — the ’70s and ’80s, which I think is the best era ever.”
Fitzpatrick entered politics when Mike — who spent a decade as a Bucks County commissioner, followed by four (nonconsecutive) terms in Congress — announced that he wasn’t running for reelection to the House in 2016. At that point, Brian had spent 15 years in the FBI, a chunk of it overseas, an experience he says opened his eyes to the wider world. But as much as he loved the Bureau, his gut told him it was time to come home. One reason Mike had opted not to run for another term in Congress was that he was battling melanoma.
“My brother has six kids. My other brother, Jim, is special-needs. My parents were getting older,” Fitzpatrick says now. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do back in Bucks, but slowly a plan formed. “I needed a job. I had a long talk with Mike. He never encouraged me to [run], but I could tell he wouldn’t be disappointed. He had a number of legislative initiatives that he was not going to be able to see through because he was sick.”
And so in 2016, Brian Fitzpatrick — Eagle Scout, G-man — became a candidate for Congress, and he won; it’s a feat he repeated in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. While many moderate Republicans in Congress have, one by one, bitten the dust in the Trump era, Fitzpatrick has — so far — survived. One key to this success? Political good fortune. He benefited from Republican tailwinds in three of those election cycles — and he’s never faced a particularly well-known, well-funded Democrat. (That’s in contrast to Mike, who’s remembered for his Ali-Frazier-style battles with Democrat Patrick Murphy; Murphy took the seat from Mike in 2006 before Mike won it back in 2010.)
Being ubiquitous back home has also helped Fitzpatrick. “He’s everywhere,” says a Bucks Democrat who doesn’t want to speak for attribution. “If there’s a gathering of five people in Bucks County, he’ll be there.”
Maybe the most significant factor is the makeup of Bucks County’s voters. It’s not just that the county is pretty evenly split party-wise — at present there are about 200,000 registered Republicans, 190,000 registered Democrats, and 85,000 “others” — it’s that even those R’s and D’s tend to be center-right or center-left. Bipartisanship and centrism might be dead in much of America, but the brand Fitzpatrick has crafted as an independent-minded moderate plays particularly well at home. As that Bucks Democrat puts it, “I think the average Bucks County voter believes he’s trying to get it right.”
Not that everyone is a fan. In addition to questioning whether his independence is more for show than impact, opponents charge that Fitzpatrick can be, well, a little weaselly when it comes to explaining and owning what he’s done. In terms of his ubiquity in his district, critics say he can be quick and slick about it — a handshake here, a photo there, then out the door, with no real substantive exchange about issues. Indeed, over the past year the progressive group Indivisible has ridden Fitzpatrick hard for having held only one in-person town hall during his entire time in Congress — and that was back in 2017.
Fitzpatrick fires back fiercely when I mention town halls. They’re not models of civic discourse, he says; they’re staged gotcha moments exploited by hyper-partisan activists. “Isn’t it interesting that no one ever called for me to have a town hall when Joe Biden was president?” he asks. “They’re looking to waste people’s time; they’re looking to embarrass people. They’re looking to get a video clip they can use AI to distort.”
If he’s not eager to engage publicly with left-wing ideologues, Fitzpatrick hasn’t always been so accessible to the local press, either. In a piece it published last spring about Fitzpatrick’s voting record, the Bucks County Courier Times noted that the congressman hadn’t replied to at least eight requests for comment sent between February and April that year. The Inquirer has reported similar experiences of ignored requests for comment.
I bring this up to Fitzpatrick, who initially says that calls from reporters can sometimes be overwhelming. “We probably got 25 today, between Politico, CQ, Roll Call, CBS News, the Washington Post,” he says. “They want to talk about the ACA. They want to talk about Ukraine.” But a few minutes later, he allows that whether he sees a publication as biased is also a consideration. When I say that I don’t perceive either the Courier Times or the Inquirer to be hack partisan outlets, he replies, “The Inquirer is.” He likes Inky reporter Julia Terruso, he continues, “but we’ve had some experiences with the Inquirer that have not been great. They’ve shown their true colors. And I hope they get better.” (After endorsing Fitzpatrick’s reelection in 2018 and 2020, the paper’s editorial board went against him in 2022 and 2024, citing, in part, his vote against the post–January 6th impeachment of Trump.)
Fitzpatrick and wife Jacqui Heinrich at the 2025 Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C. / Photograph by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
I should be clear here: Fitzpatrick isn’t anti-media, particularly when it comes to opportunities that give him the chance to talk about bipartisanship. Last summer he and Democrat Tom Suozzi were guests on Jon Stewart’s podcast (viewed on YouTube 300,000 times and counting). And in 2024 he appeared on Netflix’s goofy food/travel show Somebody Feed Phil, breaking bipartisan bread in a D.C. restaurant with Democrat Pete Buttigieg.
Ooh, and then there’s People. In July, the publication ran a story about Fitzpatrick getting engaged to Fox News White House reporter Jacqui Heinrich. (They met a few years ago aboard Senator Joe Manchin’s houseboat.) The story detailed how the congressman had popped the question, at sunrise, in a lavender field in the South of France, while the couple was on a quick getaway. Also included: a photo of Fitzpatrick on one knee in said lavender field — taken by a French photographer, hidden in the blooms, whom Fitzpatrick had arranged to be there. (As for how all this ended up in People, well, one presumes the engaged couple leaked it.)
Heinrich looks to be a good match for Fitzpatrick, at least insofar that she, too, has bruises from our hyper-partisan age. Though she works for Fox News, she’s been known to ask tough questions of President Trump. The commander in chief isn’t one to let such things pass.
“I watched Jacqui Heinrich from Fox over the weekend, and I thought she was absolutely terrible,” the president posted on Truth Social in March. “She should be working for CNN.”
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So, yes, President Trump. Though they’re both registered Republicans, it would be hard to find two people who’ve lived their lives more differently than Fitzpatrick and the current occupant of the White House. Fitzpatrick has spent his career in public service; Trump has spent his chasing money, celebrity, and power. Fitzpatrick is the poster boy for bipartisanship; Trump has never walked into a room he couldn’t divide. Fitzpatrick talks about country; Trump talks about … Trump.
There are certainly times when Fitzpatrick has made clear his differences with the president. He says he didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 (Fitzpatrick penciled in Mike Pence) and 2024 (he penciled in Nikki Haley). And he’s been outspoken about Ukraine, which the congressman sees as the defining struggle of our age. “Russia is our enemy,” he says. “They identify us as their enemy, and they back it up with everything they do. … So you cannot be, quote unquote, America First and be pro-Russia.” What does he think is behind Trump’s repeated appeasement of Vladimir Putin? “Lack of moral clarity,” Fitzpatrick says. In early January, he also pushed back on the president’s declaration that the U.S. would be running Venezuela after capturing Nicolás Maduro. “The only country that the United States of America should be ‘running’ is the United States of America,” Fitzpatrick said bluntly.
But he’s far less blunt when I bring up some other Trumpian issues. When I ask how he feels about what’s happened to his beloved FBI under Kash Patel, Fitzpatrick calls it “heartbreaking.” But then he adds, “You know, we’ve seen the weaponization of the Justice Department now, I believe, in two administrations.” Of Trump’s recent call for six Democratic members of Congress to be hanged after they posted a video reminding U.S. troops of their duty not to obey an unlawful order, Fitzpatrick calls it “unbecoming” — not exactly the harshest language one might use in condemning, you know, a threatened execution. (A threatened execution of people with whom one works closely on the issue of … getting along.)
Clearly, Fitzpatrick picks his spots when it comes to hammering Trump. That’s at least partly out of pragmatism. He mentions how the Trump administration froze funding for Head Start programs across the country, including the one in Bucks County. “I needed to work with the executive branch to make sure they got their grants,” he says. “If I was one of those people that just did nothing all day every day but criticize the administration, do you think I would be able to get that for my constituents?”
But the kid-gloves act also reflects the reality that, though Fitzpatrick wishes otherwise, politics remains a team sport.
“If you’re a centrist, life is easier if the opposition is in power,” says Philly Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle, a friend of Fitzpatrick’s. (The duo traveled to Ireland in 2019; Fitzpatrick brought along his dad, Jim, now 91, whose own father was born in Ireland.) “Life is most challenging when your side has the trifecta” — control of the House, Senate, and White House — “because now you’re needed for almost every single vote in order to pass the president’s, or the party’s, priorities.”
Which brings us back, of course, to the One Big Beautiful Bill. I should note here that the legislation was the kind of thing Fitzpatrick loathes, a literal symbol of partisanship. Uninterested in finding consensus on individual issues, party leaders stuff everything into one package, then ram it through the House and Senate on strictly party-line votes. A zero-sum game. We win, you lose. Both parties have done it in recent years.
Fitzpatrick says there were things in the OBBB he liked a lot, including most of the tax cuts and a provision that would have excluded tips and overtime wages from being taxed. What’s more, he says he tried to temper some of the harsher parts of the bill, working to ensure, for instance, a Medicaid provider tax rate of 6.5 percent, which would have protected Philly-area hospitals. When the bill came up for that vote in the House in late May, Fitzpatrick voted yes — hoping, he says, that the Senate might make the bill better.
As it turned out, the Senate made it worse. The Medicaid provider tax rate? The Senate lowered it to 3 percent, which Fitzpatrick felt was unacceptable. Meanwhile, constituents he cared about in his district — labor unions, nonprofits — were dead set opposed to it. When the final version came, Fitzpatrick broke with the party and voted no.
Fitzpatrick’s telling of how all this went down is plausible, though it ignores the fact that the first version of the bill — the one he supported — was pretty damned harsh itself, calling for $750 billion in cuts to Medicaid and nearly $200 billion in cuts to SNAP, all while adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt. Labor unions and nonprofits were just as opposed to that version of the bill as they were to the final one.
And, of course, Fitzpatrick’s narrative also doesn’t include the political math at play: Vote against the final version of the bill, and it wouldn’t really make a difference. But vote against the first version? Well, now you’ve torpedoed Trump and MAGA world’s prized bill. And so the distinguished gentleman from Bucks County, a lifelong Republican, made the decision to vote with his team.
If you’re inclined to crucify Fitzpatrick over that vote, I get it. But by the same token you then probably have to give him credit for what he’s done on the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits. When we talk on the phone the day after he and three other Republicans forced a vote on the credits, Fitzpatrick sounds more frustrated than triumphant. For weeks, he says, he and others had been trying to find a bipartisan way to keep the tax credits going — and they’d finally succeeded, “threading the needle” on an agreement that was acceptable to enough Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. “But the speaker would not give us a vote because he was concerned about the internal politics inside the GOP conference,” Fitzpatrick continues. “Which is not an acceptable reason to not put a bill on the floor.” And so Fitzpatrick joined with Democrats to force the vote.
Can you imagine if we didn’t have the Hatfields-versus-McCoys nonsense? The two-party system makes me angry. It really does, because we can do so much better than that.” — Brian Fitzpatrick
When we talk, Fitzpatrick sounds confident that the tax credits will ultimately be extended. After winning approval in the House, he tells me, he’s hopeful the Senate will take up the extensions again and pass a bipartisan compromise that President Trump will sign. Then again, nothing is guaranteed.
Indeed, on the day of Fitzpatrick’s mini-mutiny, I get an email from the campaign of Bob Harvie, the Democrat trying to unseat him. Skeptical that the tax credits would ever be extended in the Senate, Harvie suggests that this is one more example of strategic politicking marketing itself as independence: “The only thing Brian Fitzpatrick has perfected after nearly a decade in Congress is the art of the completely meaningless gesture, designed to protect his political future, not the people he serves.”
Of course, minutes before that I got a very different kind of email from moderate New York Democrat Tom Suozzi, who co-chairs the bipartisan House Problem Solvers caucus with Fitzpatrick and whom I’d interviewed on the phone the day before. “It’s not done without the Senate, but Brian has helped create a sea change in favor of bipartisanship,” Suozzi wrote of Fitzpatrick joining the Democrats on this one. “He showed tremendous courage and leadership.”
What can we take from all this? Was Fitzpatrick looking out for the good of the country, or just his own political future? Was he being brave? If so, what about his seeming lack of bravery on the One Big Beautiful Bill?
Ironically, all of it just might bolster the broader point Fitzpatrick has been making for a decade: If you have a system in which simply doing the right thing requires people to show uncommon valor, then perhaps you don’t have a very good system.
Put another way: The best case Brian Fitzpatrick, political theorist, might make for serious reform is the plight of Brian Fitzpatrick, congressman.
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Despite the fact that Fitzpatrick has won comfortably in his last three races, Democrats are feeling good about their chances of unseating him. November’s election results suggested that the political winds are blowing in their favor. (Democrats swept Bucks County’s row offices.) And the party believes they’ll have a strong opponent for Fitzpatrick in Harvie, who has wide name recognition and has been elected twice to his current job. It doesn’t hurt that the D.C.-based Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted Fitzpatrick’s seat as one it thinks it can flip.
Fitzpatrick himself is sounding undeterred. “I’m going to keep doing this as long as I can,” he says. “I have absolutely no question that I’m making a big impact.” He references the calls he’s been getting from the media — “We’re truly at the tip of the spear on issues” — as well as his fight for Ukraine.
“I can’t tell you how many calls I get from Ukraine, from members of parliament, from President Zelensky himself, saying, you have no idea how important your voice is.” He’s certain the Trump administration is paying attention to him.
As for his — and George Washington’s — dream of a country with no political parties? He continues to dream. “Can you imagine if we didn’t have the Hatfields-versus-McCoys nonsense?” he asks. “The fights over Thanksgiving dinner about Democrats versus Republicans? The two-party system makes me angry. It really does, because we can do so much better than that.”
I mentioned at the beginning of this story that President Trump criticized Fitzpatrick for his vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill. Here’s exactly what the president said: “I did [Brian Fitzpatrick] a big personal favor. As big as you can get having to do with death and life. Sure as hell, he voted against us. … [S]o much for favors.”
The full story is this: The biggest accomplishment of Mike Fitzpatrick’s tenure in Congress was the establishment of a cemetery for military veterans in Bucks County. Although Mike himself had been in the Navy Reserve, he didn’t have enough service time to warrant being buried in the cemetery after he passed away in 2020. But when then–House Speaker Kevin McCarthy got wind of the situation, he made some calls to the Pentagon, which issued a waiver. Today, Mike Fitzpatrick is buried in the cemetery he helped create.
I ask Brian Fitzpatrick if he thinks Trump invoking his dead brother — in a partisan political fight — crossed a line. “Yeah, I do,” he says. “I was really upset to hear that.”
Of course, the president isn’t the only one who sometimes thinks about Mike.
“Mike gave me advice while he was on his deathbed,” Fitzpatrick says. “He said, ‘Everything you do, put yourself in my position. Looking back — what would you wish you would have done?’ He said there are a lot of decisions you can make that will buy you another two years but are going to make you miserable as you grow old.” He pauses. “These are the kind of things that really got seared into my brain.”
It’s wise advice. Too bad we live in a moment — and a system — in which it’s so hard to follow.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said Fitzpatrick has declined to say if he voted for Donald Trump in 2024. A spokesperson for Fitzpatrick says the Congressman has publicly stated when asked that he voted for Nikki Haley in the November 2024 general election.
Published as “The Distinguished Gentleman from Bucks County” in the February 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.