Cruz and Rubio spar in fifth Republican debate

Among the dozen or so hard-core supporters gathered Tuesday night to watch the senator take part in the Republican debate was Aaron Snodderly, a 32-year-old state employee.

Donald Trump, the leading candidate according to most polls, doubled down on his statements that all foreign Muslims should be temporarily barred from entrance into the United States, but former Florida Governor Jeb Bush pushed back, calling Trump a “chaos candidate”.

Instead, some of the most heated exchanges were on serious policy disputes between first term Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz… “You started off here”, Trump said, gesturing to his place at the center of the stage where the leaders in the polls stand. “You’re moving further and further”.

Rubio favors increased US interventionism overseas, while Cruz has said that American interventions have been disastrous, particularly in the removal of dictators who have kept a lid on unrest. The main lesson Jeb Bush drew from recent experience in the Middle East was that the United States needs a “strategy to get in and a strategy to get out”.

Trump dismissed his rival’s attacks with a wave of his hand saying: “These are people that want to kill us, folks”.

“ISIS is gaining strength because the perception is that they’re winning, and President Obama fuels that perception”, Cruz said.

Republican presidential candidate former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (right) speaks as businessman Donald Trump (left) gestures and Texas Sen.

In light of growing rumours of a possible brokered candidate at the convention in July, Mr Trump pledged to stick with the Republican Party and not to run as an independent third party candidate if he was not ultimately declared the party nominee. “It is radical Islamic terrorist”, said Texas Senator Ted Cruz. He again repeated his threat to “carpet bomb” extremists in Iraq and Syria.

Adelson and his wife, Miriam, are said to be trying to decide between Rubio and Cruz as the GOP candidate to back.

“We should be able to penetrate the internet and find where out exactly where ISIS is”. “And why didn’t we stop it?”

“And let me mention, this issue is actually directly connected to what we’ve been talking about (national security)”, Cruz said at the CNN-hosted debate Tuesday night. They traded barbs on the expiration of the National Security Agency’s legal authority to collect bulk phone data.

But Rubio noted that Cruz had voted against defence authorisation bills and had supported defence cuts that would make such bombing impractical. “And that tool we lost, the metadata program, was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal”.

Asked about Sweet’s assertion that Cruz is “unequivocally” opposed to legalization, Rubio’s campaign said that was news to them. But Trump has neither backed down nor dropped in national opinion polls. Rubio came in third with 15 percent. Rand Paul, R-Ky., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, however, that Trump had brought up an important issue, stressing the need to protect American citizens from Islamic State militants.