Hutzell: Andy Harris has a temper. This will make him angry again.

Michael McDowell met Andy Harris at a League of Women Voters forum.

The congressman was taking audience questions and McDowell, a retired journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, asked about his Hungarian roots.

“That’s my speciality, foreign policy, and I have a friend who’s a former cabinet minister in Hungary,” McDowell said.

That’s when he met the real Andy Harris.

Angry Andy.

“He said he wouldn’t talk to me because I had threatened to kill one of his campaign workers,” McDowell recalled.

“It shook me up ... It just stunned me.”

That was 2018. Harris filed a police report, but nothing came of it.

As the whole world saw last week at another League of Women Voters forum, Harris has a temper.

During his 27 years as a state senator from Baltimore County and a Republican congressman in the 1st District, his blowups have become the stuff of legend. No surprise, he wouldn’t talk with me about them.

Members of my family regularly vote for Harris. Many dismiss his anger as Andy being Andy, and appreciate what he’s done in office.

But he’s shown a pattern of needless hostility, of being mean. For someone whose job is to represent the people, it’s an abuse of power to demean and threaten constituents and others.

It isn’t just the audience in Cambridge or 22-year-old college journalist Cat Murphy that sets him off. It seems to be, well, everyone who disagrees.

“Anybody can be passionate or combative in a debate, and there’s not anything intrinsically wrong with that,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who has campaigned against Harris. “But all of these intemperate and combative qualities are in service of essentially authoritarian policies and authoritarian politics.”

In Cambridge, Harris chastised the audience for laughing at his answer on diesel fuel prices. He threatened to have Murphy arrested after she said he should answer my Banner colleague Brenda Wintrode’s question in a post-forum press scrum.

Harris wildly misstated Maryland law on recording and threatened to seize her phone — to the delight of the social media commentariat. The University of Maryland student became a national hero for standing up to a bully.

The congressman stormed out, and in the ensuing days, cast himself as the victim of liberal media and New Jersey Democrats bused in for the forum. He said he’d been the target of death threats.

Women in particular get under Harris’s skin.

In 2008, he unleashed on a Towson University student testifying in Annapolis to expand voter registration on college campuses.

Harris told her she was promoting voter fraud and that students shouldn’t be able to register to vote in the state unless they are permanent residents. It’s an argument, sure, students are often part-time residents.

But voter fraud?

The student’s name was Sarah Elfreth, now the Democratic congresswoman from Annapolis. She retells the story to illustrate what inspired her to run for office.

Raskin served with Harris in the General Assembly and remembers when his indignation froze the Senate in 2009.

A University of Maryland student committee wanted to show a porn movie as part of a national dialogue on pornography. A stupid idea, maybe, but one protected by free speech.

Harris introduced a floor amendment to cut all university funding — not just for movies, but for math and science — from the budget. Everything.

“He was exquisitely angry and, despite the fact that he’s the chair of the Freedom Caucus, he does not have a First Amendment bone in his body,” Raskin said.

Harris was elected to Congress the following year and took his conniption fits to Washington. He was infuriated, Politico and others reported, when he found out his health insurance wouldn’t kick in for 28 days and berated two women staffers.

“This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed,” he said.

Raskin followed Harris to Congress six years later, but there was no friendly reunion. Maryland delegation members say they work together on common issues. I’ve never heard any of them talk about pleasant interactions with Harris.

“I’ve only known two people who don’t say hi on Capitol Hill when you pass them in the hall, or you bump into them on the floor, and one is Andy Harris,” Raskin said, “and one was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who now I think does say hello to people across the spectrum.”

The same year he popped off at McDowell, Harris wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying that he bruised his wrist while fleeing pot-smoking radicals outside his office.

One of them, Rachel Ramone Donlan, said it was a peaceful protest on legalizing medical cannabis, and Harris hurt her when he slammed his door.

In the tense January days after Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, members of Congress rushed to break up an argument between Harris and Rep. Al Green of Texas over certifying Biden’s victory.

“He called me a liar!” Harris yelled, according to HuffPost.

Two years ago, protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and humanitarian aid approached Harris. He called them terrorists and began recording them.

I got up close to a Harris tantrum in 2025.

After he rebuffed calls to meet constituents in person over federal job cuts in the second Trump administration’s early days, I wrote a critical, satirical column.

He didn’t like it and threatened not to speak with anyone from The Banner until I was fired. He said it again last week.

Early voting starts Thursday, when Harris faces Democrat Dan Schwartz.

Maybe most voters don’t care about being respectful. My guess is they just don’t know the history of Harris’s temper. Maybe the run-in with Murphy last week will change that.

To be clear, McDowell never threatened to kill anyone. Peace is part of his life. Queen Elizabeth II awarded him the Order of the British Empire for work on the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement ending sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

The incident made McDowell a vocal Harris critic, and he was in the audience in Cambridge when Angry Andy appeared again. The outbursts were nothing new to him.

“He seems to have some sort of impulse control problem,” McDowell said. “He can’t stand anybody criticizing him.”