On 1 October, democracy was officially suspended in the US people's House of Representatives.

Now, two weeks in to the federal shutdown, we are living with the results. Millions of Americans are going without important government services, and hundreds of thousands of hardworking civil servants are being forced to go without pay while bills pile up and mortgages come due. Children with cancer are being turned away from experimental drug trials at the National Institutes of Health. The Center for Disease Control is left without enough manpower to track the spread of the flu, potentially leaving vulnerable populations at risk. Small business owners are finding it difficult to secure loans. And the list goes on – to the tune of $160m or more in lost economic activity every day.

It didn't have to be this way. There are enough votes in the House to pass the Senate's "clean" bill to fund government – and this already represents Democrats being willing to compromise to accept the GOP's post-sequester funding levels for the short term. It would have easily passed the House with a bipartisan majority – had the House Republican leadership brought it to the floor for a simple up-or-down vote. But House Republicans – many of whom have long had the goal of shutting down the government – effectively wrote the shutdown into law with just hours left on the clock.

If that sounds unbelievable and outrageous, it's because it is.

The chairman of the House rules committee conceded that, under normal procedure with clause 4 of rule 22, if the House amends a Senate bill and the Senate rejects the House's amendment(s), any House member has the right to bring the original Senate bill up for an immediate up-or-down vote in the House. But just two hours before the government was poised to shut down, House Republicans quietly rigged the rules in their favor. They changed that rule to ensure that only Republican majority leader Eric Cantor could bring the Senate bill to reopen the government up for a vote – something they have refused to do.

The Republicans thought they would get away with this. They had assumed that voters would not notice this egregious display of power and would overlook the fact that they had fundamentally changed the way our representative democracy operates. But they were wrong.

This past Saturday, on the House floor, as almost 200 Democrats lined up to sign a petition to open the government, I called the Republicans out on their manipulation of the rules – and the video of the exchange has already been viewed nearly 3m times.

While it involves arcane parliamentary procedure, this issue is fundamental to our democracy. The public recognizes what's at stake in this debate. They recognize that rigging the rules to keep the government shut down makes a mockery of the democratic process in the people's House.

It's time to stop stalling and allow democracy to work its will. If Speaker Boehner would simply allow the House of Representatives to work as it was designed to, we could open the government immediately.