Senate Democrats have kept the government shut down for over a month now. Republicans have given them more than a dozen opportunities to reopen the government with a clean funding extension, but, every time, Democrats have blocked it and forced hardworking Americans to continue suffering.

How much longer are Democrats going to keep the government shut down? The victims of Democrats’ shutdown are piling up, but Democrats don’t seem likely to spare anyone anytime soon. Air traffic controllers and other federal employees are working without pay. Military families are turning to food banks. Millions of American families will be without nutrition assistance thanks to Democrats prolonging this shutdown. And amid all of this, we hear Democrats talk about using the shutdown as an opportunity for “leverage.”

While Democrats search for leverage, Republicans are trying to reopen the government. Again, more than a dozen times we’ve offered a clean funding extension. We’re not asking Democrats to support Republican policies. We’re just asking them to reopen the government and end all of this pain and uncertainty. A few Democrats have voted for it, and even labor unions that often align with Democrats have endorsed the clean bill. But the vast majority of Democrats remain dug in.

Democrats claim they want to negotiate with Republicans about the Obamacare issue that they created, and we are happy to have a discussion about Obamacare’s failures just as soon as Democrats stop holding the government hostage. Republicans are ready to have discussions about health care because we know that Democrats’ signature health care law, Obamacare, has done nothing to address the problem of rising health care costs. Democrats, of course, promised it would. But every time we hear them talk about Americans facing a health care crisis, they’re admitting that Obamacare failed.

Now they want to put a band-aid on Obamacare by extending the Biden COVID bonuses at the cost of $350 billion to taxpayers, which will do nothing to stop Obamacare premiums from going up by double digits. Republicans are ready to have a discussion about actually lowering health care costs for hardworking Americans and increasing health care accessibility, but we won’t do it while Democrats hold the federal government hostage to their partisan demands.

Over the last month, Democrats have done everything they can to spin their shutdown as somehow Republicans’ fault. But let’s be clear. Democrats passed Obamacare without a single Republican vote. They created the Biden bonuses without a Republican vote. They set the expiration date for those subsidies by themselves. They chose to shut down the government despite Republicans putting up a nonpartisan funding extension and promising to discuss the problem Democrats created. And now they have kept that shutdown going for a month and wreaked havoc on countless Americans’ lives.

It’s time for Democrats to end their political games. It’s time they stopped thinking about their political leverage and considered the consequences of their shutdown. Supporting a clean funding extension shouldn’t be hard. We just need a handful of Democrats to be courageous enough to stop bowing to demands from the far left and do the right thing.