For years, Democrats have thundered from every podium, press conference and Sunday show that any government shutdown is reckless, destructive and indefensible.

Whenever Congress hits a budget impasse over federal funding, Democrats have decried it as a “hostage situation.”

They have said shutdowns hurt families, seniors, farmers, veterans and small businesses.

They have demanded compromise.

Now? Those same Democrats are suddenly just fine with plunging the American people into a shutdown — because it suits their political agenda.

The House last week, ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline, passed a bill to keep funding the government at its current levels for eight more weeks — but Senate Democrats blocked it, demanding billions in new spending as ransom for its passage.

The hypocrisy could not be more apparent.

Take Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In 2018, he declared, “We shouldn’t shut down the government over a dispute.”

“No president should pound the table and demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down, hurting millions of Americans,” he scolded then.

Fast forward to today, and suddenly it’s Schumer pounding the table, insisting it’s his way or the highway.

Or former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who in 2019 said, “There is no such thing as a good shutdown of government.”

“The president cannot hold public employees hostage,” she added.

Yet here we are, watching her party hold those same public employees hostage in pursuit of its extreme priorities.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is no different. Just last year, he lectured that “reckless” shutdowns mean “families will be hurt. Farmers will be hurt. Border security and border patrol agents will not be paid.”

But now, as Democrats try to drive us off the shutdown cliff, Jeffries’ hands are directly on the wheel.

Families, farmers, border agents — the very people he once pretended to champion — are suddenly expendable.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) once blasted a shutdown as a “vegetative, stupid, uncalled for, people-affecting process.”

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D- Calif.) warned that “a government shutdown will only hurt middle-class families across the country.”

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler flatly said, “Shutdown is really an extremist policy designed to appeal to an extremist base and hold the whole country hostage.”

And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in her very first floor speech, thundered: “It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want.”

Yet every one of them has walked away from their own words these last few weeks, either voting for a shutdown or pushing their party toward one.

The American people deserve honesty, consistency, and above all a government that works for them — not one that lurches from crisis to crisis because each party believes the rules only apply when it’s politically convenient.

Let me be clear: I have never wavered in my commitment to do everything in my power to keep the federal government from shutting down.

Nobody wins in a shutdown — least of all the hardworking families in New York’s 17th District who depend on veterans’ care, Social Security, Medicare and other essential government services.

A shutdown throws hundreds of thousands of families into limbo, with federal workers furloughed and paychecks put on hold.

Every week the government is closed, billions of dollars vanish from our economy.

Markets grow jittery, investments stall, and the uncertainty rattles everyone from Main Street to Wall Street.

That’s why I’ve consistently fought to reach bipartisan agreements to keep the government open — even when it’s meant standing up to the fringes of my own party.

It was wrong for Democrats in the House to force the government to shut down when Ronald Reagan was president, it was wrong when House Republicans forced a shutdown when Barack Obama was president, and it’s just as wrong today for Democrats in the Senate to force a shutdown now that Donald Trump is president.

Neither party is without blame.

But I have always pushed for responsible appropriations, fiscal discipline and secure borders, while rejecting political gamesmanship that hurts the very people we were elected to serve.

Democrats once claimed to believe all that, too. Their own words prove it.

But their actions now tell a very different story.

So next time you hear a Democrat lecture you about “extremists” and “hostage-taking,” remember this: When it suited them, they said exactly the same thing about shutdowns.

And when it suited them, they abandoned those principles.

That’s the very definition of hypocrisy, and the American people deserve better.

Senate Democrats should vote with Republicans to pass a clean continuing resolution and keep the government open, so that we can finish our bipartisan appropriation negotiations before the end of the year — and do the job we were sent here to do.

Mike Lawler represents New York’s Hudson Valley area in the US House of Representatives.