'Damning indictment': Senate Dem says GOP exposed as 'fraudulent' on their biggest issue

This week's implosion of a bipartisan border security bill was proof that the Republican Party has no fundamental principles outside of loyalty to former President Donald Trump, according to the bill's lead Democratic negotiator.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), who negotiated the details of the bill with Sens. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), had nothing but kind words for his fellow negotiators in a wide-ranging recent interview with Politico. However, Murphy said the bill's abrupt and sudden death spoke volumes about his colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

"I’ve never seen an about-face like this in the 20-plus years I’ve been in politics," Murphy said. "[T]he only silver lining to what just happened is that it exposes the Republican Party as fraudulent on the issue of the border. They had a bipartisan deal that would have made a huge down payment on fixing the problems of the border, and they ran for the hills because they don’t want to fix the border."

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Murphy detailed how he spent hours of every day for multiple weeks on the phone and in closed-door meetings with Lankford and Sinema, who both sought substantive policy fixes for the US' antiquated immigration system. He added that he he even "priced in" the assumption that Trump would be against bipartisan border security legislation, but believed his GOP colleagues when they said they would vote in favor of the bill despite Trump's opposition.

However, Trump continued to rail against the bill and warned Republican lawmakers against supporting it, which led to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) pledging that the legislation would be "dead on arrival" should it pass the US Senate. Soon after, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) ultimately voting against the bill he spent weeks crafting.

Sen. Murphy pointed out that when the bill started out as a supplemental foreign aid package, Republicans opposed it with a populist argument, saying aid for the US' own borders should come first before any money gets appropriated to overseas governments. Then, when Democrats conceded to a vast swath of Republican demands on border policy, they did a 180 and killed the most conservative immigration bill in decades.

"I think that you can talk about the border as an issue the Democrats want to solve and Republicans want to exploit. But I also think you can show what just happened here as more evidence that Republicans probably can’t solve anything if they are in charge because they are constantly fighting each other, even on the issue that they all claim to be united on, which is the border," Murphy said. "That is a pretty damning indictment of how broken their party is. I think that’s going to be a very big theme between now and the election."

READ MORE: GOP fell into their own 'clever trap' by killing their biggest policy priority: analysis

Click here to read Murphy's full interview.