NEW: “How Susan Collins’ PPP Bill Helped Bail Out Big Businesses” [The Daily Beast]

Collins Changed Language So Large Companies – Including Those That Donate to Her Campaign – Can Claim Millions in Loans Meant for Small Businesses

Senator Susan Collins is responsible for inserting language into the Paycheck Protection Program bill that she co-authored that “allowed special interests and big donors to access the… PPP” while small businesses in Maine and across the country were left out, according to a new story today from The Daily Beast. Collins is running a campaign ad touting the fact that she “wrote” the PPP, while leaving out her behind-the-scenes efforts to allow her hotel industry donors and corporate special interests to raid the taxpayer funds as more than 100,000 small businesses have been forced to shutter due to the pandemic.

“Senator Collins took a bill meant to be a lifeline for small businesses and turned it into a slush fund of taxpayer dollars for her corporate donors,” said DSCC spokesperson Helen Kalla. “Collins has proved that she will always put the wealthy special interests who prop up her campaign first, even if it means leaving hardworking families and small businesses out in the cold.”

The Daily Beast: How Susan Collins’ PPP Bll Helped Bail Out Big Businesses

By Eleanor Clift

Key Points:

• Senator Susan Collins is fighting for her political life with a new television ad that says “in a time of crisis, real leaders step forward. Others disappear.” 

• The ad touts that the Maine Republican co-wrote the Paycheck Protection Program that’s provided $2.5 billion in forgivable loans to more than 26,000 small businesses in the state. It doesn’t mention that she also allowed special interests and big donors to access the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP.

• Collins acknowledged in a radio interview on Maine broadcaster Mike Violette’s radio show Wednesday morning that she was one of the senators who’d worked to include an exception in the bill that allowed big hotel and restaurant chains to receive PPP money as long as they had fewer than 500 employees “per physical location.” 

• Noting that the initial draft of the PPP did not have that “carve-in” for chains, Common Cause’s Beth Rotman, an expert in money and politics, told the Daily Beast, “Essentially a combination of wealthy special interests together with well-placed contributors at a critical moment bought a revision to our stimulus package that defined small business as including big business because they owned large franchises made up of hundreds of smaller entities. They were following the law they helped write.” 

• An examination of contributions to Collins for Senator, and to her leadership PAC, during the first quarter of 2020 reveals $13,000 in contributions in mid-to-late February from the American Hotel and Lodging Association PAC, the Hilton Worldwide PAC, and the International Franchise Association.

• At the end of April, the CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association co-wrote an op-ed for the Bangor Daily News with the CEO of Hospitality Maine, declaring that “Maine hoteliers, and the industry at large, are lucky to have Collins advocating on our behalf” and stopping just short of endorsing her re-election bid as Maine’s tourist industry struggles to adapt to COVID-19. 

• Collins’ office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

• In her interview with Violette on Wednesday morning, Collins said that “ I was able to get an exception included in the bill. And I think it’s made a real difference to some of our restaurants and hotels in Maine that are locally owned and needed that kind of relief.”

• According to The Washington Post, publicly traded companies received more than $1 billion in PPP funds meant for small businesses. They included 43 companies with more than 500 workers, and several recipients “prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more.” 

• By releasing an ad crediting herself as the creator of the PPP, Collins is betting that voters in Maine will remember the good things about it: that the government acted quickly and was able to set aside partisan feelings to get money to people that needed it. 

• She’s hoping voters won’t blame her for the fact that so many of the loans went to big businesses with deep pockets instead of the mom-and-pop businesses she likes to tout.  

Read the full story here.

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