The corona crisis is not Mitch McConnell’s first trip to the rodeo. McConnell was around for 9/11 and the 2008 fiscal collapse; he was a leader during the 2012 fiscal cliff and the January 2019 lengthy government shutdown. Opinions on his policies and tactics vary, but no one doubts he had a very substantive understanding of how the Senate works and how, with remarkably little provocation, it can grind to a halt. Mitch McConnell can also count to 60, and he knows that the Senate must have 60 votes to consider a bill. How, then, to make sense of two key decisions McConnell has made that seem all but assured to slow the effort to address the urgent needs of employees, families, companies, state and local governments in responding to the medical and economic impacts of the pandemic.

The first inexplicable decision by McConnell was to develop his $2 trillion bill without consulting Senate Democrats. It is one thing for the Senate to strong-arm the House to take a bill on the grounds that no other version (for example, a version favored by the House) can clear the 60-vote threshold. Happens all the time. But it is quite different to exclude the minority of senators, especially if there are only 53 in the majority, and expect they are simply going to swallow an historic spending and policy bill they have had no role in developing. Once the bill gets to the floor, it only takes a majority to defeat Democratic amendments or pass the bill, so if Schumer’s forces want to register any concerns, the cloture vote is their lone opportunity to do so. And they did.

The second inexplicable position was to bring that Republican-only bill to the floor – twice! – before reaching an agreement with the minority. McConnell knows perfectly well there are some serious differences of opinion between Senate Democrats and Republicans, and that Nancy Pelosi and the House majority have raised precisely the same objections: a need for conditions on the use of bailout money so companies can’t use taxpayer dollars to buy back stock and inflate executive and shareholder wealth; restrictions against golden parachutes and limits on executive compensation, so taxpayer funds support employees not the front office; greater scrutiny of how decisions are made to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds to companies (are foreign-owned cruise lines eligible ahead of small businesses owned by Americans?)

None of these are big surprises for McConnell or any other Republican. The disputes between the parties are virtually the same as during the TARP debate a dozen years ago when George W. Bush, Henry Paulson and other administration negotiators resisted demands by Pelosi, Senate leader Harry Reid, Financial Services chairman Barney Frank and other Democrats for restrictions on executives benefitting from taxpayer dollars designed to sustain financial institutions. At that time, the Bush administration argued such provisions would discourage corporate leaders from participating in the TARP program. At one point, a Democratic negotiator incredulously asked an administration negotiator whether executives would rather let the economy crash than accept restrictions on their pay, and the answer was an unqualified “yes.”

So if McConnell knew these issues would have to be resolved before Schumer could allow the bill to proceed, why wasn’t he talking to the New York senator instead of presenting the “my way or the highway” ultimatum? After all, Pelosi had spent over a week in intensive talks with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin notwithstanding her intense dislike of virtually everything the Trump administration has done over the past three years. But Pelosi is operational, and knows there is little point in asking her members to vote for difficult legislation that is only going to be sidelined by the Senate or rejected by the president.

The answer seems obvious. McConnell wanted the bill to fail in the Senate. To this point, the Trump administration bears total responsibility for the federal response to the COVID19 crisis, and McConnell and the Republicans are justifiably worried about the implications of the poor reviews and the resulting stock market free fall and recession on their prospects in November. Clearly, McConnell had to create a scenario whereby it appeared Democrats were obstructing his efforts to ameliorate the economic impacts.

Putting a bill on the floor that Democrats had to oppose, because of its manifest shortcomings, lay completely within McConnell’s power. The Senate majority leader decides what goes on the floor and when. Typically, he negotiates with the minority leader to ensure unfettered consideration. But in this case, McConnell didn’t want smooth sailing; he wanted obstruction so he could blame Democrats for the delay. McConnell may not especially care how Trump is impacted by the crisis, but he cares very much how his Senate majority is affected, and it is helpful to him to be able to point to the procrastinating minority Democrats to make the case: don’t elect any more of them!

Twelve years ago, during the TARP debate, the phrase that made members grate their teeth was that the manipulative financial services companies were “too big to fail,” and taxpayer had no choice but to bail them out. In the COVID19 crisis, the McConnell strategy is “designed to fail” in order to force Democrats to share blame for a crisis they did not create and are working with the Trump administration to solve.