That's actually an old and effective political strategy. Perhaps distasteful, but part of the game in the same sense that icing the kicker in football is part of the game (as consequence of the rules of time-outs).
I've even seen it used to good effect to strong-arm otherwise unreachable organizations when they choose to be anti-social. During the housing crash, one of the major non-profit universities a city panicked about its investments going shaky and abruptly decided to stop paying into some multi-decades-long standing donations that back-stopped some city services. The non-profit was paying into that donation pool because state law that had made sense in the 1900s and a lot less sense in 2000 made those non-profits non-taxable (but they had eaten up a significant percent of available real estate in the city center, none of which could generate tax revenue to pay for city services).
The city responded by preparing an ordnance that would tax out-of-town students directly.
The uni responded that this would be obviously illegal on its face as per state law.
The city responded that they believed the uni was presenting a reasonable legal theory that they were happy to debate back-and-forth in county, circuit, state, and appeals court for the next five years.
The university returned to the negotiating table and hammered out a new plan to pay a percentage of their former amount into the donation pool, preventing what would have otherwise been a heavy disruption in city services at a time when everyone was hurting from the housing crash.
Messy, but this kind of creation of leverage is what makes political systems operate at all at multiple scales of governance.