Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), now a MSNBC contributor, said Monday on “Deadline” that the Republican Party has “always ginned up this phony voter fraud thing” when discussing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) supporting Republican-led state legislatures forwarding election laws.

McCaskill said, “Liz Cheney has been swept off the island, and she is grasping onto a very skinny tree that is trying to keep her on the island called Republicans. The way she is doing this is by basically embracing very important Republican orthodoxy. This is not something that just happened with Donald Trump. For years the Republican Party has made part of their orthodoxy that, ‘Well, too many people are voting. We have to figure out a way to stop all these people from voting that don’t vote for us.’ They’ve always ginned up this phony voter fraud thing. They have always been trying to do phony voter I.D. laws and other ways to stop people who may be more transient and less stable in terms of employment. Basically, people who traditionally voted against Republicans and for Democrats.”

She added, “The Republican orthodoxy used to be free trade. Nope. Trump got rid of that. It used to be we have to be careful how much money we spend in government. Nope. They busted out the deficit in ways that people could only dream of. So all the orthodoxy is gone. The only thing they stand for now as a party is making sure that people can’t vote easily. I don’t know what that says about their party, but I don’t think it’s good. Everybody in America is hearing that they don’t want you to vote. That’s going to make people want to vote. I don’t think this will have a good ending for them or for Liz Cheney.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN