The Bipartisan Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick

As part of the 100 Days Speaker Series, Brian Fitzpatrick, U.S. Congressman for Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District, was recently welcomed to Dartmouth College for a conversation on bipartisanship. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Center, the event was co-moderated by Professor Jason Barabas and students Noah Amidon ’27 and Michael Blair ’28. The discussion focused on Fitzpatrick’s efforts in fostering dialogue on key issues shaping the early days of the new presidential administration, including how to forge bipartisan relationships during these polarizing times.

A member of the Republican Party, Fitzpatrick was first elected to Congress in 2017. As a former FBI Special Agent and federal prosecutor, he has extensive experience in counterterrorism and anti-corruption efforts. He led the FBI’s Campaign Finance and Election Crimes Enforcement program and served in the Public Corruption Unit. His time at the Bureau also included stints in Ukraine and Iraq.

Today, Fitzpatrick is widely recognized as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. Next to serving on the influential Ways and Means Committee, he co-chairs nearly 20 other congressional caucuses, including the Congressional Ukraine Caucus and, crucially, the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. This group, according to Fitzpatrick, is the only true two-party group in Congress.

Serving in his fifth term, the congressman has been through several political transitions in Washington. And he believes the role the Problem Solvers Caucus plays is now more important than ever, particularly during the recent period that has been marked by rapid change. The second Trump administration’s first 100 days have been tumultuous to say the least, with Fitzpatrick likening it to “shock therapy.” This unique and aggressive approach has left many people across the country concerned. As he put it, “clearly, the temperature is very, very high right now.” And with great caucus leadership comes great responsibility. The congressman sees his role as calming people down, lowering the temperature in the room, and helping to bridge gaps between differences. This is something Fitzpatrick wishes was more common throughout Congress. As the country is about to take up a number of very significant and potentially expansive legislative issues, the fate of those bills remains very uncertain. In a Congress with no incentive to find common ground, lawmakers pay a political price for breaking with the party line.

But what has led the country to this status quo? According to Fitzpatrick, the maladies plaguing Congress can be broken down into two core problems. The first involves the current governing structure. At present, 218 votes decide everything. If you get 217 votes, you get nothing. But a 218 to 217 vote total is reflective of a very divided electorate that wants compromise. Fitzpatrick is a believer in more of a coalition-type government, rather than the current zero-sum, “all-or-nothing type” system the nation currently has.

This problem is further compounded by the second major issue: the widespread use of so-called “closed primaries” across many states. Unlike New Hampshire, where open primaries allow moderating forces to engage in politics and actually impact the outcome (a feature which is lauded by Fitzpatrick), closed primaries are exclusive: if you are not registered with one of the two major parties, you cannot vote in that primary election. This has far-reaching ramifications. Not only does this disenfranchise independents, but also fuel polarization by shutting out centrist influence at a critical stage of candidate selection. Fitzpatrick adds that such primary constructs affect how representatives vote on many issues. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not uncommon for representatives to go to the House floor, see a partisan policy they do not agree with (such as border security for the left, or Ukraine funding for the right) and feel forced to vote along party lines. These members are fittingly dubbed the “vote no, hope yes” crowd. Many want to vote against party lines, but don’t because they are worried about a primary challenger.

To rectify this situation, Fitzpatrick maintains that election reform is possible. A primary mechanism could be the federal government’s ability to tie funding to certain electoral reforms. Toward this end, Fitzpatrick supports the “Let America Vote Act,” a bill introduced in the 119th Congress. While this bill still allows states to decide their mode of primary election (e.g., a jungle primary or ranked-choice voting), it requires states to allow registered, unaffiliated voters to vote in a primary election of their choice. Allowing independents to vote in primaries, he argues, tends to allow moderates a greater chance to emerge from the primary and into the general election. This indirectly hinders a situation where the electorate must pick between the lesser of two evils in a general election.

Alaska could serve as a role model. After implementing its electoral reform bill in time for the 2022 election cycle, the state demonstrated how a more open and flexible system can empower voters to choose candidates across the political spectrum. With just one gubernatorial, Senate, and House district, Alaskans elected a conservative Republican governor, a moderate Republican senator in Lisa Murkowski, and a Democratic House member – and all on the same day, with the same electorate. For Congressman Fitzpatrick, this is living proof that structural change can encourage cross-partisan outcomes and better reflect the complexity of voter preferences. The states offer plenty of opportunities for bipartisanship.

Structural reforms can offer a promising path toward reducing polarization, but recent history has made it increasingly clear that a deeper, systemic challenge looms over the nation: campaign finance. Any serious conversation about political dysfunction must also grapple with the influence of money in elections. Achieving true bipartisan progress requires confronting the outsized role that money plays in shaping who runs, what gets debated, and ultimately, what gets done. This challenge becomes all the more urgent when considering the real issues confronting Americans today: the soaring cost of living, a health care system strained by inequity and inefficiency, growing concerns over food quality, and the long-term implications of rising national debt.

At the heart of this broader dysfunction lies what Congressman Fitzpatrick sees as the defining problem of this political era: the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling. This controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision sparked significant outrage. At its core, the Supreme Court identified corporations as people. The Court has, for a long time, viewed political speech as tantamount to free speech. This makes sense. The controversial part is that the Court now identifies political donations as speech, and not property. As such, there has been strong criticism of the decision for granting disproportionate political power to large corporations.

At the time of the decision, Fitzpatrick was in the FBI’s Corruption Unit. He recalls FBI director Robert Mueller calling him up to his office immediately after the verdict and being asked a very basic question: What will this do to the corruption situation? Fitzpatrick’s response: “We need to dive into the decision, but my gut tells me it’s going to make the problem worse.” The Congressman insists that it is a constitutional challenge the nation is trying to grapple with, and that the broader discussion about campaign finance needs to center around it.

For Fitzpatrick, the Supreme Court focused on the wrong constitutional principle. They should have focused on corruption mitigation, and not exclusively free speech. To say money is speech is to say that wealthy people have greater free speech rights than people of lesser means. But that is the core of the Citizens United argument: political contributions are free speech, protected by the First Amendment. The Congressman believes contributions are property, not speech. Accordingly, the act of donating to a campaign is a transfer of wealth, and should be treated as such. To further complicate matters, the Supreme Court in the past has already placed caps on federal contributions. The maximum an individual can donate to federal candidates per election cycle is $3,500. This ironically means that the Court has also recognized that unlimited donations do have a corrupting influence.

Fitzpatrick is clear in his personal stance: he supports contribution limits and rejects the idea that political donations constitute speech. While he is open to a constitutional amendment to reverse the decision in principle, he stresses that any such effort must be approached with extreme caution. Revising the First Amendment is a delicate and potentially very dangerous undertaking. Still, the Congressman expresses a willingness to take a leading role in crafting a conservative-leaning reform, particularly one aimed at reining in dark money. “I’m 100% supportive of that,” he says, “but the challenge has always been that it puts us squarely in the First Amendment realm – and we have to figure out how to navigate that.

Aside from structural reform, Congressman Fitzpatrick’s connection to Ukraine also runs deep. His final international assignment as an FBI agent saw him stationed in Kyiv shortly after the Euromaidan revolution. President Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former leader who was beholden to Vladimir Putin, had been exiled. Under Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine was trying to forge closer ties with the West and Europe. In order to join the EU or NATO, certain metrics must be met. However, the country was falling short on two in particular: economics and corruption, two factors that were interlinked. The economic problems were a direct consequence of the corruption issues, Fitzpatrick elaborated, something very common in Eastern Europe and former Soviet countries. The Congressman helped implement a National Anti-Corruption Bureau to put Ukraine on a path toward actively indicting and convicting elected officials who were engaged in corruption. Changing such an entrenched system was never going to happen overnight. Broad changes require a long-term effort to shift deeply rooted mindsets and dismantle a culture where corruption has become normalized. But he saw the effort as essential to Ukraine’s democratic development and its alignment with the West.

What struck Fitzpatrick most during his time in Ukraine – both as an FBI agent and on his recent visit to the front lines in Kharkiv – was the extraordinary resilience of the Ukrainian people. Standing just miles from the Russian border, he reaffirmed a promise he made to President Zelensky and to the soldiers he met: that the United States will not abandon them. “We are not going to allow Russia to win,” he declared, expressing confidence that a decisive bloc in Congress will ensure continued support. Toward this end, he has already issued a discharge petition in the past (an act that circumvents the Speaker and House leadership and forces a bill to the floor for a vote) and maintained he has already introduced a discharge petition to force a second Ukraine support bill to the floor. For Fitzpatrick, the stakes go beyond Ukraine. Failing to hold Russia accountable would send a dangerous message to authoritarian regimes worldwide that invading sovereign democracies comes with reward, not consequence. “The only way we can measure success in Ukraine,” he said, “is if Vladimir Putin looks back and regrets his decision to invade. That is the only acceptable outcome, I believe. And we’re going to work very, very hard to make sure that’s the case.”