Robert D. McEwen (born January 12, 1950) is an American lobbyist and former Republican Party politician. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives from southern Ohio's Sixth District, from January 3, 1981, to January 3, 1993. Tom Deimer of Cleveland's Plain Dealer described him as a "textbook Republican" who is opposed to abortion, gun control and high taxes. In the House, he criticized government incompetence and charged corruption by the Democratic majority that ran the House in the 1980s. McEwen, who had easily won three terms in the Ohio House, was elected to Congress at the age of thirty to replace a retiring representative in 1980 and easily won re-election five times.
After a primary battle with another incumbent whose district was combined with his, McEwen narrowly lost the 1992 general election to Democrat Ted Strickland. Following a run in the adjacent second district in 1993, McEwen was largely absent from the Ohio political scene for a decade, until in 2005 when he sought the Republican nomination for Congress in the second district special election to replace Rob Portman, who beat him in 1993, and finished second to the winner in the general election, Jean Schmidt. McEwen's 2005 platform was familiar from his past campaigns, advocating a pro-life stance, defending Second Amendment rights, and promising to limit taxes and government spending.
Born in Hillsboro, Ohio, McEwen graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1968. He earned a Bachelor's in Business Administration from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1972. He also attended Ohio State University's College of Law for one year from 1972 to 1973.
McEwen and his wife, the former Elizabeth Boebinger, have four children. He is a member of many fraternal organizations and civic groups, including Sigma Chi, the Farm Bureau, the Grange, Rotary International, the Jaycees, and the Optimist Club.
After two years in his wife's family real estate business, serving as a vice president of Boebinger, Inc., he was elected at the age of twenty-four to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1974 from the 72nd House District representing southern Ohio. McEwen's district contained parts of Clinton, Fayette, Greene, and Highland Counties and all of Madison County. He was re-elected to two more two-year terms. In 1976, his plurality against Democrat L. James Matter was 14,816 votes, a number larger than the votes cast for Matter. (McEwen received 27,657 to Matter's 12,841.) McEwen was a supporter of the state lottery in the House. Having previously directed Sixth District Congressman Bill Harsha's re-election campaigns to Congress in 1976 and 1978, McEwen ran for Harsha's seat when he retired in 1980. Harsha was neutral in the eight-man primary that McEwen won but supported McEwen in the general election where he defeated psychologist and minister Ted Strickland, Harsha's opponent in 1976 and 1978, who went on to become Governor of Ohio.
In Congress, McEwen, who "had a reputation as a man who thinks about politics every waking moment," claimed Congressional Quarterly, was a staunch conservative, advocating a strong military. In addition, he was a strong advocate for government works in his district — dams, roads, locks and the like much as Harsha had been — as McEwen was on the House's Public Works and Transportation Committee. The Chillicothe Gazette would salute him for his work on funding for U.S. Route 35, a limited access highway linking Chillicothe to Dayton. In general, however, McEwen advocated reduced government spending.
A vehement anti-Communist, he visited Tbilisi in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 1991 to help tear down the hammer-and-sickle iconography of the Communist regime. That year he also called for the House to establish a select committee to investigate the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue – whether any soldiers declared "missing in action" in the Vietnam War and other American wars were still alive – by sponsoring H. Res. 207.
When McEwen was first elected in 1980, the Sixth District of Ohio consisted of Adams, Brown, Clinton, Fayette, Highland, Pickaway, Pike, Scioto, and Ross Counties plus Clermont County outside the city of Loveland, Harrison Township in Vinton County and the Warren County townships of Clearcreek, Deerfield, Hamilton, Harlan, Massie, Salem, and Wayne. The Washington Post described the Sixth as "a fail-safe Republican district." It had been in Republican hands since a 1959 special election.
The Ohio General Assembly redrew the Sixth District following the results of the 1980 Census. The boundaries from 1983 to 1987 included all of Adams, Clinton, Fayette, Highland, Hocking, Jackson, Pike, Ross, Scioto, Vinton and Warren Counties, plus Waterloo and York Townships in Athens County; Wayne Township in Clermont County; Concord, Jasper, Marion, Perry, Union, and Wayne Townships in Fayette County; and Washington Township and the Cities of Miamisburg and West Carrollton in Montgomery County.
Effective with the 100th Congress in 1987, adjustments were made by the legislature to the boundaries. A small part of the Montgomery County territory was detached, as were parts of Fayette County in Washington Court House in Union Township and the townships of Jasper and Marion. Part of Brown County was added, Jackson and Eagle Townships. These were the boundaries for the rest of McEwen's service in Congress.
The district was largely rural and agricultural with no large cities. One of the major industries was the United States Department of Energy's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant at Piketon, which manufactured uranium for nuclear weapons. The district was 97% white with a median household income of $21,761.
In a heated debate in 1985 over a Congressional seat in Indiana between Republican Richard D. McIntyre, whom the Indiana Secretary of State had certified as winning a seat in the 99th Congress, and Democrat Frank McCloskey, in which the House declined to seat McIntyre, McEwen declared on the House floor, "Mr. Speaker, you know how to win votes the old fashioned way — you steal them." When McEwen was late in 1990 to the House because of a massive traffic jam on the I-495 beltway around Washington, D.C., he said on the House floor on February 21 that the District of Columbia's government should be replaced:
The total incompetence of the D.C. government in Washington, DC, has become an embarrassment to our entire Nation. This experiment in home rule is a disaster. All of us who serve in this Chamber, well over 95% of us, have held other positions in government. We have been mayors. We have been township trustees, State legislators, and the rest. I am convinced, Mr. Speaker, that there are well over 2,000 township trustees in my congressional district who with one arm tied behind their backs, could blindfolded do a better job of directing this city than the city council of D.C. It is high time that this experiment in home rule that has proven to be a disaster for our nation be terminated, that we return to some sort of logical government whereby the rest of us can function in this city.
After McEwen was criticized for his remarks, he delivered a thirty-minute speech in the House on March 1, 1990, on "The Worst City Government in America". Because of the crime problem in the District, McEwen also attempted to pass legislation overturning the District council's ban on mace, saying people in the District should be able to defend themselves. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, McEwen introduced legislation to end President Gerald Ford's ban on U.S. government employees assassinating foreign leaders (Executive Order 12333) in order to clear the way for Saddam Hussein's removal, McEwen objecting to the "cocoon of protection that is placed around him because he holds the position that he holds as leader of his country."
In October 1987, encouraged by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, McEwen announced he would challenge Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, a Democrat, in his 1988 bid for re-election, but McEwen found he lacked statewide support and would face a strong primary challenger in Cleveland mayor George V. Voinovich. He dropped out of the race in December. McEwen's name was floated in 1991 as a possible challenger in 1992 to Ohio's other senator, John Glenn, another Democrat, but McEwen did not enter the race.