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My Response to Insurance Industry Ads Attacking Me

By Bill Sizemore

Insurance Industry ads are filling the air waves with claims that Bill Sizemore "owes millions in judgments for abusing the initiative process", thus implying that Measure 42 somehow must be bad, because I am sponsoring it. I tend to ignore the nonstop personal attacks that are aimed at me, but because of the effect these ads could have on a good measure that voters should approve, I will set the record straight.

It is true that I owe millions of dollars in judgments, but it is also true is that in my entire 55 years I have never been so much as charged with a crime, let alone found guilty of one. What those insurance industry ads do not tell you is that the judgments they are talking about stem from a politically motivated lawsuit filed by two public employee unions who wanted to force me out of politics, because I was costing them money.

You see, I was putting measures on the ballot to lower taxes. Tax cutting measures put more money in Oregonians' pockets, but leave less money for public employee unions. If you have lived in Oregon long, you know that cutting taxes makes one a primary political target for some pretty powerful enemies who do not hesitate to resort to personal attacks and character assassination.

I also placed measures on the ballot that would have required unions to get a worker's permission before taking money out of his or her paycheck and using that money for politics. Frankly, unions hate having to ask for permission before taking an employee's money, because most employees will elect to keep their money.

Eventually, my opponents sued me, not because I had done anything wrong, but to make me get out of politics. I will prove that further down on this page.

Let me state something emphatically. I have never forged petition signatures or told anyone else to do so. In fact, I have caught many forgers and turned them in for prosecution. I have never knowingly signed any false tax returns for any organization with which I have worked and have never told anyone else to do so or looked the other way. My organization was railroaded in Multnomah County Circuit Court by a judge who had a clear conflict of interest and concealed it for the entire three years he presided over our case.

After three long years of making biased decisions that bordered on the absurd, our judge eventually withdrew from the case, confessing that the entire time he had handled our case, his son had been a member and activist in the same union that was suing us in his courtroom. In fact, his son is now a union president. What kind of judge would conceal such a clear conflict of interest.

We have appealed this case and will win. One reason I am quite confident that we will prevail in our appeal is that the U.S. Supreme Court recently issued a decision making it clear that there is no legal basis for lawsuits like the one filed against us. An honest, competent judge would have acknowledged this in the beginning and not allowed our case to go to trial.

Voters should know that even with a biased judge filtering everything the jury heard, the jury did not find me personally responsible for any wrongdoing whatsoever. In fact, I was never even a defendant in the case.

The union lawyers made this clear when they told the jury: This case is not about Bill Sizemore. Bill Sizemore is not being sued. Bill Sizemore is not a defendant in this case. (Doesn't this make it rather odd that I am being held personally responsible for a judgment stemming from a trial in which I was not even a party or defendant?)

Please think about this for a moment: Because of measures I have placed on the Oregon ballot, average homeowners all across the state pay a thousand to two thousand dollars a year less in property taxes than they would have otherwise. If you consider that every property owner in the state is affected, that's a lot of money public employee unions can't get their hands on. That's why they want me out of politics. By saving you money, I cost them money.

If you doubt the veracity of that statement, consider this: Recently, the unions came to me through their lawyers and offered to forget the entire $4 million I allegedly owe them. All I had to do was sign an agreement to drop my appeal and stay out of politics for fifteen years. I had no choice but to reject their offer. To me, it sounded like political blackmail.

Between the public employee unions and the liberal newspaper editors, my name has been thoroughly trashed. I accept that as part and parcel of my job as a taxpayer advocate in a fairly leftwing state. However, the fact that the insurance industry is attacking me personally in an attempt to defeat Measure 42 only serves to demonstrate how weak their other arguments are.

Measure 42 is a good measure. It's the right thing to do. It forces insurance companies to charge premiums based on real risk factors such as driving histories, not something so absurdly unrelated as a person's credit score. There is no persuasive evidence proving that credit scores are related in any material way to frequency of accidents.

I hope you will see through all of the distortions and personal attacks and vote Yes on Measure 42.

Bill Sizemore