We are almost through Day One of the first major shut­down of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in sev­en­teen years, and sad­ly, it still appears that House Repub­li­cans are unwill­ing and unready to do their jobs. They could have eas­i­ly avert­ed the shut­down days ago by sim­ply pass­ing the con­tin­u­ing bud­get res­o­lu­tion the Sen­ate sent them, and then send­ing a nego­ti­at­ing team to the bar­gain­ing table to ham­mer out a bud­get over a longer peri­od of time. They chose not to.

Instead, they have dug in and dou­bled down, and our coun­try is suf­fer­ing for it.

Repub­li­cans are so obsessed with win­ning that they have trans­formed the polit­i­cal land­scape into a war scene. They cede only what they are forced to cede. They have con­trol of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and they are using it to crip­ple the Amer­i­can peo­ple’s gov­ern­ment to make a polit­i­cal state­ment. Their scorched earth tac­tics are caus­ing seri­ous harm to this country.

They could not stop the Patient Pro­tec­tion Act from pass­ing, so they spread fear, uncer­tain­ty, and doubt about the law (remem­ber the “death panels”?).

They then chal­lenged the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the Patient Pro­tec­tion Act, but the courts repeat­ed­ly upheld it, with George W. Bush’s own hand­picked chief jus­tice pro­vid­ing the piv­otal vote in the Supreme Court’s land­mark decision.

Final­ly, they went all out to defeat Barack Oba­ma and cap­ture the Sen­ate in 2012, with Karl Rove orches­trat­ing a mas­sive cam­paign against the Pres­i­dent and Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors. As we all know, they lost. Barack Oba­ma eas­i­ly defeat­ed Mitt Rom­ney, who cam­paigned on repeal­ing the Act, and Democ­rats increased their majori­ties in the Sen­ate, as well as in the U.S. House, despite gerrymandering.

None of those loss­es have deterred House Repub­li­cans. They could­n’t win in the courts, the court of pub­lic opin­ion, or at the bal­lot box. So now they are try­ing extor­tion. Black­mail. Either you agree to our demands, or we will make sure the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is not open for busi­ness on Octo­ber 1st. That is the out­ra­geous mes­sage they have deliv­ered to Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and Sen­ate Democrats.

They, and they alone, bear the blame for the shut­down. They say Democ­rats refuse to com­pro­mise, to nego­ti­ate. That’s just laugh­able. There is no nego­ti­at­ing with extor­tion­ists. Extor­tion­ists demand and insist on capit­u­la­tion. They demand ran­soms. They are not inter­est­ed in cooperation.

House Repub­li­cans gam­bled that if they played hard­ball, Democ­rats would capit­u­late. It has­n’t hap­pened, and now we are see­ing signs that the least extreme of the House Repub­li­cans are begin­ning to panic.

They fear the con­se­quences of a shut­down — per­haps not the con­se­quences for their own con­stituents, but cer­tain­ly for themselves.

The rest of the Repub­li­cans seem not to care that their intran­si­gence has incon­ve­nienced mil­lions of Amer­i­cans and put hun­dreds of thou­sands more out of work. They stu­pid­ly expect Demo­c­ra­t­ic capit­u­la­tion to sud­den­ly just hap­pen at some point, and they are will­ing to wait for it. Per­haps a very long time.

Democ­rats must not, and should not, capit­u­late. They should make Repub­li­cans pay a steep price for their attempt at black­mail. What they must say every day is: Let’s not for­get that House Repub­li­cans forced this fed­er­al gov­ern­ment shut­down to hap­pen. It was their choice. They knew full well that all they need­ed to do to stop nation­al park gates from being pad­locked and pub­lic work­ers kept home was to pass a con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion to keep the gov­ern­men­t’s doors open.

House Repub­li­cans were asked to sign off on that res­o­lu­tion. The Sen­ate had already passed it; the Pres­i­dent would sign it imme­di­ate­ly if it were passed by the House. But they have refused. John Boehn­er could, if he want­ed, take the fac­tion of more rea­son­able Repub­li­cans with him and join the House Democ­rats in vot­ing for a clean con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion. But he is no leader. He is a coward.

The Tea Par­ty wing of the House Repub­li­can cau­cus, mean­while, are act­ing like spoiled chil­dren throw­ing an epic tem­per tantrum — spoiled chil­dren who are think­ing only of them­selves, not the well-being of their fam­i­ly. They are putting their fam­i­ly’s hap­pi­ness and integri­ty at grave risk with their greed, self­ish­ness and stub­born­ness. It is a depress­ing, ugly spectacle.

And it’s about to get worse. In a few days we will be a week away from the day when the U.S. Depart­ment of Trea­sury says it will no longer have the author­i­ty to pay the nation’s bills. A fail­ure by Con­gress to raise the debt ceil­ing could have a cat­a­stroph­ic effect on our coun­try. If a major­i­ty of House Repub­li­cans can­not be roused to their sens­es, then the minor­i­ty who can have a patri­ot­ic duty to help Democ­rats keep the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca func­tion­ing. We will all lose and lose big if Repub­li­cans con­tin­ue to fly the ele­phant over the Stars and Stripes.

As the Pres­i­dent said today:

I will not nego­ti­ate over Congress’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to pay bills it’s already racked up. I’m not going to allow any­body to drag the good name of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca through the mud just to refight a set­tled elec­tion or extract ide­o­log­i­cal demands. Nobody gets to hurt our econ­o­my and mil­lions of hard­work­ing fam­i­lies over a law you don’t like.

There are a whole bunch of things that I’d like to see passed through Con­gress that the House Repub­li­cans haven’t passed yet, and I’m not out there say­ing, well, I’m not — I’m going to let Amer­i­ca default unless Con­gress does some­thing that they don’t want to do.

That’s not how adults oper­ate. Cer­tain­ly that’s not how our gov­ern­ment should oper­ate. And that’s true whether there’s a Demo­c­rat in this office or a Repub­li­can in this office. Doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s a Demo­c­ra­t­ic House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives or a Repub­li­can-con­trolled House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives — there are cer­tain rules that every­body abides by because we don’t want to hurt oth­er peo­ple just because we have a polit­i­cal disagreement.

So my basic mes­sage to Con­gress is this: Pass a bud­get. End the gov­ern­ment shut­down. Pay your bills. Pre­vent an eco­nom­ic shut­down. Don’t wait. Don’t delay. Don’t put our econ­o­my or our peo­ple through this any longer.

For as long as it takes, the Pres­i­dent should go on say­ing this. He should con­sid­er going on the road, too, and tak­ing that mes­sage to the Amer­i­can peo­ple, to put more pres­sure on House Repub­li­cans. The only way to stop this kind of extor­tion from becom­ing rou­tine is to fight it and fight it hard.