October 17, 2014 10:43 AM UTC

Fact Check: Gardner voted for the government shutdown

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• by: Jason Salzman

(The con is full-on – Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado senatorial candidate Cory Gardner took his falsehoods about the government shutdown to a new level this week when he told PBS’ Guen Ifill:

Gardner: “I voted for every measure that would have avoided the shutdown. I supported efforts during it to make sure we were finding ways not only to get out of the immediate situation but to make sure that we develop long-term solutions."

That's the kind of rotten information journalists should correct before it's too late. Everyone who follows this issue at all knows that Gardner voted with fellow Republicans to shut down the government in an effort to kill Obamacare. Gardner was fully behind using the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to try to de-fund the health-care law. As Gardner told KOA Radio's Mike Rosen in August: "I believe that we don’t need to shut down the government because we ought to just lift this health-care bill out of the way and let America work." As part of a fact-check of a recent ad, 9News political reporter Brandon Rittiman explained how Gardner's votes led to the shutdown, just after Colorado's horrific floods:

Gardner did vote in line with the Republican strategy that led to the government shutdown. That didn't happen by passing a bill to shut it down… Those votes were Republican spending packages, which passed the House. They would have funded the government, but also contained language aimed at curbing Obamacare. For that reason, the president made it clear he wouldn't sign that bill, which had no chance of passing the Senate regardless. Republicans knew they could cause a shutdown by forcing the healthcare issue to be part of the discussion about keeping the government open. However, it takes two to tango, and the Democrats didn't want to mix the ACA into the spending debate. It would have been possible to accept the GOP plan and avoid a shutdown. Whether it was fair to bundle those concepts is the core of the debate.

Against after reading that, even if you're on Gardner's side and you wanted to force Obama to de-fund the health-care law, is there any way you could claim, as Gardner did, that he voted for "every measure that would have avoided the shutdown?" Not.