“The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had a chance to kill him”, Rubio fired back.
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He then slammed former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, the SC senator who has endorsed Bush: “Lindsey Graham, who had zero in his polls …” He’s alone among the six candidates on stage in criticizing Bush.
Trump has long bragged about being against the Iraq war.
It did feel, in parts, like a conservative death match, playing out before an ever more anxious mainstream Republican party. He said it destabilized the Middle East while empowering Iran in the region. Mr Trump took out his machete again.
Bush added while Trump was “building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus” to keep Americans safe.
Trump invoked September 11, shooting back that the “Twin Towers came down”.
Bush, the son and brother of a president, was the outlier here. Subscribers to that view included Senator Ted Cruz, the devoted constitutionalist and avowed opponent of subjective readings of it. Only Jeb Bush stood out against that particular hypocrisy, while doubting that Mr Obama would come up with a candidate palatable to Congress.
Scalia’s death, announced earlier on Saturday, and the consequences for the conservatives’ 5-4 advantage on the high court cast a shadow over the ninth debate between rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.
If he did, he would “ram down our throat a liberal justice, like the ones Barack Obama has imposed on us already”, he said.
Donald Trump and Jeb Bush are tangling over Vladimir Putin’s role in the Syrian civil war.
“It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that Russian Federation could be a positive partner in this”, Bush said.
The odd thing is that after months of watching Trump say things that are racist, absurd, patently false, or all three at once the Republican Party establishment chose to stomp on him for saying things that are basically true.
Bush provoked another outburst from Trump by saying the Republican nominee should be someone “who doesn’t brag, for example, that he has been bankrupt four times”. “You know why he’s doing poorly”, he asked. That’s Jeb’s special interests and lobbyists talking.
John Kasich says the United States needs to build a “coalition of civilized people” to take out the Islamic State group and restore American leadership around the globe.
Kasich said last week that he wouldn’t be a marshmallow if attacked. Trump exclaimed in a second tweet.
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both of Cuban heritage, tried to out-Latino each other, with Cruz challenging Rubio in Spanish at one point.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also agreed with his fellow candidates, but remarked the president does have every right to nominate a Supreme Court Justice.
It was a ideal forum for Cruz, who has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, to show off his legal credentials.
Republican White House hopefuls insisted that President Barack Obama step aside and let his successor nominate the next Supreme Court justice, in a raucous Saturday night debate that also featured harshly personal jousting over immigration and foreign policy.
Cruz avoided a direct question about whether he would pledge as president not to try to fill judicial vacancies late in his term. Bush pulled a puzzled face at that one, a reference to a comment the former Florida governor made to the Boston Globe’s Matt Viser.
“I’m sick and exhausted of him going after my family”, Bush said. “It’s called delay, delay, delay”, he said.
John Kasich is also advising the president to hold off on selecting a successor because he says it would further divide the country. Repeated invocations of the notion that he “kept us safe” have managed to make this a controversial claim, but I promise you that it is true.
As for Obama nominating a replacement, he said, “We should not allow a judge to be appointed during his time”.
The candidates and audience observed a brief moment of silence before the debate got under way. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are contesting the Democratic ticket. But then, he said, the Senate should have its say.
John Kasich is proud of efforts he made while in Congress to trim what he believed to be wasteful defense. Bush in particular will need a solid showing in SC, given his prominent political family’s ties to the state, while Kasich is just hoping to remain viable until the race heads to friendly territory for the Midwestern governor. You have to knock them off strong.
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Trump, coming off of a sizable win in New Hampshire and Iowa caucus victor Cruz will be looking to add another state to their columns when South Carolina Republicans vote on February 20.
