Roggensack Record Earns Her Another Round of Big Corporate Funded TV Ads

MADISON, Wis. — Big corporations and insurance companies favorite Pat Roggensack is the beneficiary of yet another television ad blitz funded by the special interests with whom she often sides on the state’s high court. According to media reports, the big business lobby the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) is footing the bill for a new ad promoting Roggensack in advance of the April election.

One Wisconsin Now Executive Director Scot Ross commented, “Time and again Pat Roggensack has sided with the special interests over Wisconsin families. And in the closing weeks of the campaign, it looks like those same special interests are paying her back.”

According to a rating of members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by a corporate special interest front group, Roggensack is the justice who most often sides with their interests in her votes and opinions since 2010.

Ross cited Roggensack’s opinion in the Touchpoint Health Plan case as a particularly egregious example of her pro-corporate allegiance. In her minority dissent, Roggensack supported an insurance company’s refusal to pay for doctor recommended treatment of a three year-old boy with a cancerous brain tumor. A majority of the court disagreed with Roggensack’s siding with an insurance company over the boy and his family and found the company’s denial of coverage for cancer treatment was “arbitrary and capricious.”

In the recent February Supreme Court primary election, special interests sponsored over $600,000 in television and radio ads on behalf of Roggensack. The total spending by WMC on their recent ad blitz is undisclosed.

“The special interests are determined to keep their stranglehold on the state court, and based on her record, Pat Roggensack is all to willing to lend them a hand,” concluded Ross.