2016 Fox Business Republican debate: news and updates

During the sixth Republican debate, in Charleston, South Carolina, an argument broke out over Donald Trump’s hometown.

“Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan, I’m just saying,” said Ted Cruz, repeating an attack he’d leveled at the bombastic frontrunner on the campaign trail. In his own defense, Cruz cited an interview Trump gave Tim Russert of Meet the Press in 1999, in which Trump told the host, “My views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa, perhaps.”

Break down the Fox Business debate by the data and you get this story: The Republican establishment is getting torched.

The Thursday night debate was supposed to be a moment for one of the establishment picks — namely Marco Rubio — to punch through. The establishment cluster of Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich needed a clear pick to go toe to toe with the Donald Trump/Ted Cruz showdown that’s dominating Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, Trump and Cruz out-talked the whole field. They soaked up the airtime handily.

By the time the Republican presidential candidates gathered onstage for their most recent debate, on Thursday evening, the 10 US sailors who’d drifted into Iranian waters had long since been safely released, and the incident that had first looked quite concerning turned out to be anything but.

The sailors, it turned out, had mistakenly wandered into Iran’s waters, ran out of gas, and, to top it all off, lost radio contact. As an anonymous Pentagon official told the New York Times, “The Iran story is frankly embarrassing. We still do not know all of the facts, but these guys and gal apparently were just poor mariners.”

The Republican debate in North Charleston, South Carolina, was supposed to be the one where the presidential candidates finally talked about the racial disparities in police shootings. Last April, a North Charleston police officer shot a fleeing black man, Walter Scott, multiple times in the back. It was such an abhorrent shooting that Fox News host Sean Hannity, a conservative defender of police, called it unjustified. Michael Slager, the cop who fired at least eight shots at the fleeing man, is on trial right now for murder charges.

Yet the shooting and issues surrounding it never really came up during the debate, just like they haven’t come up in all the previous debates aside from some brief mentions here and there.

Thursday night, Fox Business hosted a Republican debate. During the debate, many people thought they had funny things to say about it on Twitter.

But few of them could match the running live-tweeting from an account called the Relevant Organs. It is a parody account — stay with me here — written from the point of view of satirized Chinese Communist Party officials. It’s long been popular among China watchers and China-based journalists for its sendups of Chinese officialdom. But after a long hiatus, the account came back to bless us with a running commentary on the GOP debate:

The Fox Business debate on January 14 was the liveliest of the Republican presidential contests since the first Fox News event last August, when America first experienced the spectacle of Donald Trump on a debate stage. Trump and Ted Cruz, who have spent most of this campaign in a tacit truce, finally went at it, and it was glorious. Marco Rubio was more energized than we’ve seen him in a long while, though neither he nor Cruz seemed to understand what a VAT is. Jeb Bush described repealing the Dodd-Frank act as a national security issue, and John Kasich referred to the TPP trade deal as PTT for some reason. Good times all around.

We won’t know who “really” won until poll results trickle in. But in the meantime, here are the candidates who ended the night better off than they started it — and the ones who slipped.

As yet another Republican debate was winding down, the Atlantic’s fantastic political reporter Molly Ball made a really smart observation on Twitter:

Ball is referring to the moment in the debate when Trump, asked about South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s statement that Republicans shouldn’t “follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” responded that he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger.“ He continued:

Ted Cruz dominated the Fox Business News Republican primary debate in South Carolina. He went toe to toe with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. He didn’t slay either of them, but they didn’t slay him. Best of all, he was centrally positioned throughout the evening — someone who speaks for grassroots discontent with the GOP establishment, but who does so from a standpoint of a conservatism that is much deeper and more authentic than Trump’s.

The center of the party is a good position to hold in a primary, and Cruz firmly seized that middle ground. With Trump exerting a gravitational influence on the shape of the race, a guy who stood on the margin of the Senate Republican caucus suddenly looks like a useful bridge between Republican officialdom and the conservative grassroots. He’s not well-liked by the party leadership in Washington, but he’s intensely in touch with what committed conservatives think and care about.

At the Republican debate Thursday night, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie explained he wants to solve the refugee crisis by ending the civil war in Syria.

Then he said this:

Marco Rubio accused Ted Cruz of creating a new value-added tax (or “VAT tax,” as Rubio called it) in his tax plan in a robust exchange at Thursday night’s Republican debate. Cruz insisted that on the contrary his business flat tax is something very different. It’s not entirely clear why the semantics of what you call the tax are important, but Rubio accurately pointed out that “you find that tax in many countries in Europe,” and it’s possible Cruz is reluctant to admit that he’s proposing to imitate an aspect of European public policy.

But whatever Cruz’s reason for denying that his plan calls for a VAT, his plan calls for a VAT. Don’t take my word for it — ask the conservative Tax Foundation, which is rather enthusiastic about Cruz’s tax plan (the foundation says it will lead to a 13.9 percent increase in economic growth) but is very clear that it is a VAT:

It is rare for an American presidential candidate, much less a Republican, to criticize Saudi Arabia so harshly. Saudi Arabia has long been a critical partner for the United States, and every president going back decades has seen keeping it close and happy as important to US interests in the region — even though Saudi actions in the region do indeed pose real problems for the US. For Kasich to so boldly attack Saudi Arabia is quite surprising.

In that speech, Haley warned the party that no matter how dire the circumstances, they mustn’t heed the “siren calls” of the party’s “angriest voices.”

After pointing out that Haley called him a “friend” earlier in the day, he went on to say Haley had a point. “She did say there was anger. I’m very angry because our country is being run horribly, and I will gladly accept the mantle of anger,” he said to applause. He continued:

During Thursday’s debate, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said that the answer to America’s gun problem is, well, more guns: “I am a Second Amendment person. If we had guns in California on the other side where the bullets went in the different direction, you wouldn’t have 14 or 15 people dead right now. If even in Paris, if they had guns on the other side going in the opposite direction, you wouldn’t have 130 people plus dead.”

Trump was articulating the “good guy with a gun” myth: the idea that the answer to shootings — like those in San Bernardino, California, and Paris — is having more people with guns to stop violent perpetrators.

Common Core finally got its moment in the spotlight Thursday night. Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie briefly fought over the standards, which set common expectations for what students know and can do in reading and math in 43 states:

“I like Chris Christie, but we cannot afford to have a president of the United States that supports Common Core,” Rubio said.

Ted Cruz just pulled off what has seemed impossible: He made Donald Trump concede a point.

At Thursday night’s Republican debate, Cruz took on Trump’s charge that he’s not American enough for the presidency. Trump has recently started saying Cruz’s Canadian birth is a constitutional liability. When asked about the attacks Thursday night, Cruz’s second response was to explain why a child of a US citizen is eligible to be president — but his first response was to boast that Trump was feeling threatened in the polls.

During Thursday evening’s Republican debate, Ben Carson referenced a particularly strange threat to the United States — an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) deployed by an enemy to wipe out America’s electrical grid:

Carson is referring to a common version of the EMP fear: a nuclear weapon detonated high up in the atmosphere, thus supposedly sending an electromagnetic blast that would destroy electronics.

In the first Republican debate of 2016, Chris Christie said, “I didn’t support Sonia Sotomayor” for the US Supreme Court.

In 2009, Christie said:

Tonight’s sixth Republican debate will air on the Fox Business Network. But don’t worry: If you don’t have cable, you’ll still be able to tune in — an online live stream is free and available to all at FoxBusiness.com. The primetime debate will begin at 9 pm Eastern.

This time around, Fox chose to cut down on the number of candidates who will be permitted to attend. Just seven of the remaining 12 met the network’s more stringent polling qualifications for the primetime event. They are Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich.

In her opening statement at the Republican undercard debate, Carly Fiorina came out swinging against Hillary Clinton in a shocking, personal way.

“Unlike another woman in this race,” Fiorina said, “I actually love spending time with my husband.”

Here at Vox, we prefer policy analysis and sound, research-based understanding of the fundamental forces shaping politics to shallow gut-based horse race journalism. But the day of a debate featuring contenders in a primary campaign that’s been a little light on white papers and policy is a good time to think about racing horses. Rather than waste time chatting amongst ourselves, we thought we’d chat amongst ourselves and then turn it into content.

Matt Yglesias: I, personally, am really looking forward to this next Republican debate because I think we are entering a pretty unusual moment in politics where almost everyone knows they have no idea what is going to happen. So at least we can take crazy guesses. And since Andrew has just returned from the wilds of Iowa, his guesses will be maybe a little less ill-informed than the rest of ours.

CLEAR LAKE, IOWA — As Donald Trump lingered for a few minutes to meet potential caucus-goers after a Saturday rally, one man in an American flag cap tried to push through the throng.

“Donald! Donald!” he shouted. “Sign my sign!”