Good technical detail report, but the fact remains that they had a chance to stop the shutdown and rejected it so they and their staffs could get the subsidy.
So you could say they caused the shutdown when Congress offered to back down if they would forfeit the bribe.
More should be made of this, since the blame is falling on Republicans as if we invented Obamacare, a failed, unpopular, disastrous plan, in the first place.
We offered to suffer with a plan that would ruin our economy and the nation, while all they had to do was fork over a few bucks. But they wouldn’t do it. They wanted the shutdown so that Obama could scare everyone and shift the blame.