Brian Fitzpatrick steps up criticism of House Republican leaders while he starts to lean on their campaign cash

WASHINGTON — As U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s fiercest reelection battle in years got underway in the last two months, the moderate Bucks County Republican has called to restrict President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and for prohibiting a so-called “anti-weaponization fund” that could reward the president’s allies.

He’s talked up Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s potential run for president, and he’s said he would “100%” become an independent if Pennsylvania didn’t have closed primaries.

He went even further this week — deriding House Republican leadership for opposing a process that allows lawmakers like him to force a vote on issues like the weaponization fund.

“Leadership of both parties have been guilty of this for years… just further evidence of the brokenness of the two-party system — and the rise of Independent voters is a direct manifestation of this,” Fitzpatrick wrote on social media.

Behind the scenes, though, Fitzpatrick has started to lean on his party’s vast resources to help win his reelection and, Republicans hope, keep the narrowly divided 435-member House in GOP control.

In a newly scheduled television ad campaign that will begin later this month, Fitzpatrick is teaming up with the National Republican Congressional Committee — the official campaign arm of House Republican leaders — to launch ads aimed at boosting his campaign in the 1st Congressional District against Democratic nominee Bob Harvie, a Bucks County commissioner who won last month’s primary with support from Shapiro and national Democrats.

The $120,000 worth of cable TV ads represent the first foray by the NRCC in any Pennsylvania district so far this year, according to the tracking firm AdImpact.

Both parties are competing heavily over four Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania, making the state one of the centerpieces in the fight to win the House majority during this year’s high-stakes midterms.

The NRCC and other Republican groups have promised to help reelect all four incumbents. And with the new ads benefiting Fitzpatrick, the NRCC is spending first on the candidate who’s been the most publicly critical of their leadership and even gotten some blowback from Trump as a result.

“Trump can say whatever Trump wants,” Robin Kolodny, a Temple University political science professor, said of the president’s accusations that Fitzpatrick is insufficiently loyal. “But you get to 218 by adding one race at a time. And if you have an incumbent who’s been successful, the party has every incentive to support them until they find that the polling says it’s the lost cause.”

Fitzpatrick has won five terms in a nearly evenly divided Bucks County-based district with what observers have called a specific brand of politics. He votes with his party and supports Trump’s priorities the vast majority of the time, though he’s broken with them in instances like the final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill and the expiration of COVID-era Affordable Care Act tax credits that kept costs lower for individuals using the public marketplace.

His recent opposition to the anti-weaponization fund has echoes of that healthcare debate in December, when Fitzpatrick joined with Democrats in trying to use a process called a discharge petition to force a vote that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to set up.

Fitzpatrick’s office and campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But earlier this week, the Pennsylvania lawmaker and U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.) said they would launch a discharge petition to prevent Trump from creating a fund to compensate people who claim to be victims of a weaponized federal government, Punchbowl News reported. The idea for the $1.8 billion fund emerged from a settlement between Trump and the Department of Justice in a case about the leak of Trump’s tax returns.

Republican lawmakers who have often acquiesced to the president’s demands voiced deep concerns. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche responded by saying the administration was walking away from the idea. Still, Trump officials have quietly worked to keep it alive and have not ruled out payments going to individuals previously charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, The Atlantic reported Thursday.

“The statement’s not satisfactory,” Fitzpatrick said on CNN earlier this month while discussing Blanche’s comments. “We need both a legal avenue here and a statutory legislative avenue. That’s what Tom and I have introduced, and that’s what we’re going to force to the floor.”

He called the fund an “abuse” of the law. In a post on X this week, he also disparaged Republicans leaders’ “poorly managed House Floor” for preventing a discharge petition to squash it.

Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who leads the chamber, headlined a fundraiser earlier this year for Fitzpatrick, who generally does vote for GOP priorities — including this week’s successful effort provide additional funding for immigration enforcement within the Department of Homeland Security.

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi had not yet launched the discharge petition as of Thursday evening, after Punchbowl reported that Republican leadership was frustrated with the idea. Some even proposed pulling back campaign contributions from NRCC “patriots” who signed on to a discharge petition, according to Punchbowl.

Fitzpatrick is one of 15 Republicans in the NRCC’s “patriots” program that prioritizes sending resources to competitive districts.

Also on the list are U.S. Reps. Scott Perry, in a Harrisburg-based district; Ryan Mackenzie, in the Lehigh Valley; and Rob Bresnahan, in a Scranton-based district. Each of those races are considered more of a “tossup” than Fitzpatrick’s, and Kolodny said it’s likely the NRCC will invest in advertising and campaign operations to help them as well, possibly a little later in the summer.

She said the earlier spending on behalf of Fitzpatrick is likely a sign they found him to be “newly vulnerable” after the May 19 primary, when Harvie was nominated.

Widely considered the most formidable challenger to Fitzpatrick so far, Harvie has already been elected by voters twice in a majority of the district and both national and state Democrats have coalesced around him.

Kolodny called the size of the NRCC’s ad-buy “modest” but said that “that they’ve done anything at all means that their polling has shown them they’ve got a problem.”

“They have a new level of concern that they didn’t have before,” Kolodny said.

Harvie, who is expected to benefit from outside spending by the NRCC’s counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that the ads are proof Republican leaders “can count on [Fitzpatrick’s] vote when they need it most.”

“We are tired of politicians like Fitzpatrick talking out of both sides of their mouth,” Harvie said. “He claims to be ‘independent,’ but he’s seeking a bailout from Trump’s Republican Party because he is one of their own.”

Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist with a Harrisburg-based public affairs firm, said he didn’t view Fitzpatrick’s latest moves as much different from any other instance in which he’s successfully walked a “political tightrope” in his district, which is one of only nine GOP-held districts in the country that went for Kamala Harris in 2024.

He said the assist from the NRCC also makes sense because of how large Fitzpatrick’s district looms in a House that’s currently split 218 Republicans to 212 Democrats, with one independent and four vacancies.

“Leadership has an absolute interest in making sure that Brian Fitzpatrick gets reelected, despite their displeasure from time to time with what he says and does,” Gerow said.