Was Rubio ‘never … in favor of shutting down the government’?

Federal employees are now back at work, but the battle over who to blame for the government shutdown goes on.

On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., emphasized that he didn’t favor a government shutdown even though many observers have accused his party of instigating the shutdown as a way of defunding or delaying President Barack Obama’s health care law.

We looked at whether Rubio was right when he said on Fox News Sunday that “I never was in favor of shutting down the government. … (I) voted to fund the government fully.”

We found these claims problematic.

His claim that “I never was in favor of shutting down the government” is undercut by two separate comments in which he supported a strategy of opposing Obamacare even if that meant rejecting a bill that would have kept the government open. And on the question of whether he “voted to fund the government fully,” he arguably may have done so once, but took the opposite position nine times.

We rated his claim Mostly False.