The Great Recession also thrashed state budgets, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs and worsening the economic crisis. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 gave billions in fiscal aid and relief, but it wasn’t enough to offset the gap between revenues and expenditures, especially after Susan Collins — one of three Republicans to support the bill in the Senate — extracted nearly $80 billion in spending on education and additional infrastructure as the price for her vote.

By 2010, the stimulus had begun to run dry, and congressional Democrats were working to bring more water from the well. But while House Democrats could pass bills, their Senate counterparts were at the mercy of a Republican filibuster. In February alone, Senate Republicans filibustered a temporary extension of health insurance subsidies and stripped a $75 billion package of state aid and infrastructure investments down to $15 billion of tax incentives for hiring.

After Republicans won the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, conservative lawmakers went from trying to block aid to working to cut spending. Incoming House Speaker John Boehner promised to slash spending to pre-recession levels, and after a series of standoffs the following year over the debt ceiling, his House passed (and President Barack Obama signed) the Budget Control Act, which imposed deep cuts through tight caps on discretionary spending.

That same fall, not content with this attack on the recovery, congressional Republicans scuttled Obama’s American Jobs Act, a $447 billion package of infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits, state aid and tax cuts. Despite near-negative interest rates on public debt, Senate Republicans demanded that the White House offset additional stimulus with further spending cuts, including a plan to slash federal employment by hundreds of thousands of jobs — a move that would have weakened an already anemic recovery.

Without federal aid, state governments had to cut. Public sector employment dropped sharply as states slashed funds for education and public safety. In 2011, there were more than 220,000 fewer teachers than there were in 2009; by 2012, total federal, state and municipal employment had decreased by more than 580,000 jobs.

Looking back at this period in 2016, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute concluded that even if other policymakers made serious mistakes, the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession could “be explained entirely by the fiscal austerity imposed by Republicans in Congress.” Austerity put hard limits on the economy’s ability to grow, leading to persistent, long-term unemployment for millions of people.

The big difference between now and then is that Republicans hold the White House. Their chances in November rest on their ability to successfully manage the crisis. And voters may frown on a party that doesn’t do enough to prevent a second Great Depression, or causes one outright. McConnell is clever, but he’s not so clever that he can save his majority from the political consequences of economic free fall.