On Friday in a Ford manufacturing plant in Liberty, Mo., President Barack Obama lambasted Republicans for their malicious aim to shut down the government.

“This is not abstract,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans will not be allowed to go to work. Our men and women in uniform, even those deployed overseas, won’t get their paychecks on time.”

In less than a week, the government will be forced to shut down if a spending resolution isn’t passed. Members of the GOP are holding the White House to ransom — either allow the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, to be defunded or the government will not be able to function.

Republican attacks have intensified recently, using scare tactics and a fierce media campaign to coerce many potential Obamacare subscribers to delay their enrollment. It seems to be working — a recent poll suggests that 44 percent of U.S. adults believe that Obamacare will make the U.S. healthcare system worse. As New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait succinctly pointed out, Obamacare “has come to fill the place in the conservative psyche once occupied by communism and later by taxes: the main point of doctrinal agreement.”

The House voted last week 230 to 189 in favor of a stopgap spending resolution that proposed funding for all federal agencies except crucial funding for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Only one Republican had the audacity to vote against the bill. Obama has already stated on countless occasions that he will not — under any circumstances — sign into law a bill which would remove funding for an act that had already been passed by both houses of Congress and upheld via a Supreme Court ruling. However, House Republicans are content with holding the nation hostage.

Speaker John Boehner, yielding to the power of a 40-strong member faction within his own party led by Republican senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, allowed the defunding of Obamacare to be a condition for continued funding of the government last week. In a call to Boehner late on Friday night, Obama reiterated that he would not negotiate on the debt limit. Unable to whip any of his caucus into party line, Boehner is left in an untenable position. We have reached a stalemate in the Capitol.

A couple of years ago many journalists were casting the Tea Party as an irrelevant faction in Washington, D.C. Not anymore. Welcome to the new normal of Beltway politics.  Even Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana deemed the GOP “the Stupid Party” — perhaps the Extortionist Party would be a more appropriate epithet — a party bent on derailing Obamacare regardless of the economic consequences. The next seven days in Washington will be pivotal in determining the direction for the U.S. economy. The clock is running down.

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Sept. 23 print edition. Harry Brown is a contributing columnist. Email him at [email protected].