Francis Xavier McCloskey (June 12, 1939 – November 2, 2003) was an American journalist, lawyer, and politician from Indiana who served in the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from 1983 to 1995.
Initially, Mayor McCloskey was an underdog in his race against two-term incumbent Republican representative Joel Deckard in Indiana's 8th congressional district.
[citation needed] McCloskey significantly benefited from the support of Michael Vandeveer, the popular Democratic mayor of Evansville, the district's largest city, and emerged the victor on election night, 52% to 48%.
In the 1984 contest for the Democratic nomination for President, McCloskey supported Colorado Senator Gary Hart over Walter Mondale and Jesse Jackson.
McIntyre hailed from small Lawrence County in the northeastern part of the district, and spent much of the election boosting his profile in the populous Evansville area.
The task force, per House rules, instructed the auditors to ignore many of the "technicalities" that resulted in Indiana officials throwing out ballots.
[5] The vote to seat McCloskey, 230–195, was largely along partisan lines and in response every Republican House member momentarily marched out of the chamber in symbolic protest.
Once sworn in for a second term, McCloskey used his position on the Armed Services Committee to prohibit job contracting at the Crane Weapons Center.
Following the 1986 U.S. airstrikes on Libya, McCloskey sponsored legislation blocking the Marine Corps from buying bulldozers from a company partially owned by the Libyan government.
McCloskey was also able to leverage his incumbency into positive publicity after investigating possible PCB contamination from a Union Carbide plant on the district's border.
These false allegations backfired, and without having to fight Reagan's coattails, McCloskey won the rematch by a more comfortable margin, 106,662 (53%) to 93,586 (47%), carrying nine of the district's 16 counties, including another convincing victory in Evansville.
After investigating the issue, and discovering such a ban could be damaging to medical research, McCloskey adopted a position of strict enforcement of the existing regulations.
McCloskey, from his position on the Armed Services Committee, played a high-profile role in the battle over President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and argued SDI was a violation of the 1972 U.S.–Soviet ABM Treaty.
Despite his liberal voting record, McCloskey's attention to local issues and efforts to bring money back to the district earned him the support of both Evansville daily newspapers in the 1988 campaign.
McCloskey moderated his military spending views somewhat in his fourth term, voting against halting production of the B-2 stealth bomber and opposing efforts to eliminate the development of the V-22 Osprey helicopter.
McCloskey's efforts to save jobs at the district's Crane Naval Surface Weapons Warfare Center helped secure his re-election.
McCloskey narrowly lost Martin County, home to the Crane NSW center he had spent his congressional career fighting to keep open.
In addition to his work on achieving peace in the Balkans, he was named director of Kosovo programs for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in 2002.