Gov. Lincoln Chafee is a key witness for the prosecution in a lengthy new Rolling Stone article that argues Republicans have “abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent.”

The governor, who left the GOP in 2007, explicitly blames the party’s 2000s-era leadership for the stagnant economic growth that’s taken place in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree,” Chafee says in the Nov. 24 edition. “It tanked the economy.”

“The wreckage was left by Dick Cheney, Grover Norquist and the gang,” he later adds. “This was their doing.”

Chafee describes conversations he had with Cheney and then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott during the debate over the 2001 Bush tax cuts as what solidified his distaste for his party’s fiscal priorities.

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