WASHINGTON—Andy Harris visited Washington at the age of 14 and, upon seeing the Capitol, envisioned working there someday.
That dream has become a reality. At 53, Harris became a member of the House of Representatives from Maryland’s First Congressional District.
He is now also the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which will have significant influence in the lower congressional chamber. The GOP will have a narrow majority come January, along with control of the Senate and White House, as the party looks to implement President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.
Harris was elected as caucus chairman in September, succeeding Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who lost his reelection primary earlier this year.
Influence Without Dysfunction
The membership in the Freedom Caucus is not publicly disclosed, although there are members who have identified themselves as such.The Freedom Caucus is known for sometimes being a thorn in the side of the wider House GOP, especially its leadership, but Harris said he’s taking a more conciliatory approach, especially with Trump in the White House.
“I think we will have an influence in the narrow majority,” Harris said.
Members of the Freedom Caucus resisted the leadership of former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker of the House. Some members ultimately backed him after getting significant concessions from McCarthy, who won the gavel after 15 rounds of voting in January 2023.
Harris said he doesn’t expect a repeat episode when it comes to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“He’s delivering on what he said he was going to deliver,” Harris said. “And I think that if he continues to deliver on that, that it won’t be an issue.”
These promises include not putting forth an omnibus budget bill, he said.
Harris said he plans to support Johnson for speaker and has a good working relationship with him.
“We’re fellow conservatives. We believe in a lot of the same things,” he said. “And he’s always been receptive to my input and welcomes the input.”
Relationship With Trump
The Freedom Caucus, which was started in January 2015, is known for its staunch support of Trump.According to Harris, the dysfunction that the House GOP has experienced with its narrow majority in the current Congress will not carry on to the next session because Trump is in the White House.
“The major difference is that we have President Trump having been elected with a mandate,” he said.
“Actually, I think most people would recognize that President Trump’s coattails resulted in a House majority, and I would hope that we function as a unified House majority to deliver on President Trump’s agenda for the American people.”
Harris said he last spoke with Trump after becoming Freedom Caucus chairman on Sept. 17.
“It’s the presidential uniform,” said Harris.
But his and the caucus’s relationship with Trump will not be without scrutiny, he said.
Harris said the Freedom Caucus, which advocates fiscal responsibility, will “exert a tempering influence” on the president when he makes moves that go against the caucus’s values.
“There are a lot of people in the caucus who think that President Trump probably didn’t restrain spending as much as he should have in his first term given that the economy was good,” he said.
“[However,] there’s going to be a little more leeway for the president this time, but we will always make the argument that we have to be mindful of our federal debt and our federal deficits, and we have to have a long-term plan to deal with it.”
Room for Negotiation
Although the GOP will have control of both houses of Congress, the filibuster in the Senate requires 60 votes to advance most legislation. Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has confirmed that the filibuster will remain intact, which Harris agrees with.The GOP, with a projected 53–47 advantage in the Senate, will have three chances to pass reconciliation bills.
Harris called for the first reconciliation bill to be “relatively small” and “noncontroversial” and deal with Trump’s promises on the border, energy, and no taxes on tips. Extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts and other measures that can be completed through reconciliation should be left for later in 2025, he said.
Whether reconciliation should be used to raise the debt ceiling is arguable, according to Harris. But a negotiation could lead to Freedom Caucus members agreeing to an increase in exchange for getting something in a general reconciliation bill.
He noted that caucus members would not support a clean ceiling increase.
Nonetheless, the caucus will negotiate with moderate proposals, according to Harris.
“The way it has to be perceived is that there is nothing off the table, but to put something on the table would require both sides to put something on the table,” he said.
Harris said Freedom Caucus members “might realize pragmatically it probably has to be retained” but in exchange for a conservative agenda item that moderates may not like but would have to agree to in a negotiation.
Moderates, Harris said, might want to keep some of the green subsidies under that law, which he would prefer to see completely repealed. In exchange, he said, moderates could give the Freedom Caucus “concessions on some tax issues.”
“I fight pretty hard for what I believe in, but I think I also appreciate when you kind of won enough in the compromise to accept it,” Harris said.
Despite the will to negotiate, the Freedom Caucus has its red lines, said Harris.
“I think that if the conference ... opposed the president on a conservative agenda item, we would exert our influence within the conference,” he said.
Personal Background
Harris, a Christian, was born in New York City on Jan. 25, 1957.His father, Zoltán Harris, was born in Hungary, and his mother, Irene Koczerzuk, was born in Western Ukraine. They immigrated to New York and, as naturalized citizens, “never missed a vote,” he said.
“They couldn’t understand how an American could not get out and vote every opportunity they had,” Harris said.
He recalled that “politics [was] frequently discussed, was a frequent dinner table conversation about what was going on at the government level.”
Although the family lived in Queens, they had a 40-acre farm in upstate New York where they grew hay.
Harris has always been a Republican, as the party was known for its anti-communist stance, and the GOP, he said, “is the party of liberty and freedom” and the party that’s “the ideal” of the nation that his parents came to.
The future of the GOP, according to Harris, is “the party of the working man and woman who isn’t getting a fair shake, whether it’s from government regulation, whether it’s from their neighborhoods not being protected, whether it’s a wide-open border.”
Harris attended Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in biology and a medical degree. He practiced anesthesiology at the school and served in the Navy Reserve in a medical capacity. He was a commander during the 1991 Gulf War. A stethoscope sits on Harris’s desk in his Capitol Hill office.
He served in the Maryland state Senate between 1999 and 2011 before being elected in 2010 to represent Maryland’s First Congressional District, which includes all of the state’s eastern coast.
Harris’s constituency and Freedom Caucus responsibilities are “not mutually inconsistent,” he said, as his district is overwhelmingly conservative, and the caucus is “the repository of a lot of the conservative thinking on Capitol Hill, and completely consistent with the overwhelming majority of my district.”
Harris, who is the only Republican member of Congress from Maryland, joked that “there are a lot of people in Maryland who don’t really consider the eastern shore part of Maryland.”
“I joke with people ... if we take the eastern shore of Maryland, combine it with Delaware, Delaware becomes a red state,” he said.
Practicing medicine and politics are different, according to Harris—the former is objective while the latter is subjective.
“In medicine, if you come to me as a patient and you have a set of symptoms, there actually is a right diagnosis and a wrong diagnosis, and it’s kind of black and white. You either have this disease, or you don’t,” he said.
“In the legislative process, there’s a whole lot of gray.”
Harris recalled that he was told earlier in his career that “the right decision is whatever a majority of people say on a given day.”
“And that takes a little getting used to when you see the world as having a set of facts and always operating from the premise that there is actually a right and wrong decision based on that set of facts that is the right diagnosis and all the other ones are wrong diagnoses,” he said.
Outside of work, Harris’s main hobby is repairing old vehicles and tractors. He is currently repairing a 1950 Dodge that his wife’s family owned.
Harris has been married to his wife, Nicole, since 2017 after his first wife, Cookie, died in 2014. He has five children.
Family matters a lot to Harris.
Advice he would give his younger self: “Your time with your family is precious” and that both family and career “are important.”
