(see Heritage, here, for a more comprehensive view of the following)
ISIS
Paul: “ISIS rides around in a billion dollars worth of U.S. Humvees … We didn’t create ISIS—ISIS created themselves, but we will stop them, and one of the ways we stop them is by not funding them, and not arming them.”
Cruz: "If you join ISIS, if you wage jihad on America, then you are signing your death warrant.”
Criminal Justice
Kasich: “I had an opportunity to bring resources [from Medicaid] back to Ohio to do what? To treat the mentally ill. Ten thousand of them sit in our prisons. It costs $22,500 a year to keep them in prison. I’d rather get them their medication so they can lead a decent life. Secondly, we are rehabbing the drug addicted. Eighty percent of the people in our prisons have addictions or problems. We now treat them in the prisons, release them in the community and the recidivism rate is 10 percent and everybody across this country knows that the tsunami of drugs is threatening their very families.”
Illegal Immigration
Bush: “I believe the people coming here illegally have no other option . . . There should be a path to earned legal status for those who are here, not amnesty.”
Trump: “We need to build a wall, and it has to be built quickly. And I don’t mind having a big, beautiful door in that wall so that people to come into this country legally.”
Rubio: "Let me tell you who never gets talked about in these debates—the people that call my office who have been waiting for 15 years to come to the United States, and they’ve paid their fees, and they’ve hired a lawyer and they can’t get in. They’re wondering if they should come illegally.”
Obamacare
Trump: “[A single-payer system] works in Canada, it works incredibly well in Scotland. It could’ve worked in a different age… What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state.”
Common Core
Rubio: “The Department of Education, like every agency, will never be satisfied. They will not stop with it being a suggestion. They will turn it into a mandate.”
Bush: “I don’t think the government should be involved in the creation of standards directly or indirectly, the creation of curriculum or content.
Economy
Kasich: “Economic growth is the key. Economic growth is the key to everything.
Christie: “If we don’t deal with [entitlement reform], it will bankrupt our country or lead to massive tax increases—neither one that we want in this country.”
Huckabee: “If Congress wants to mess with the retirement program, why don’t we let them start by changing their retirement program and not have one,
Bush: The new normal of 2 percent that the left is saying you can’t do anything about is so dangerous for our country.
Iran Nuclear Deal
Walker: “This is not just bad with Iran, this is bad with ISIS. It is tied together, and once and for all, we need a leader who’s gonna stand up and do something about it.”
Paul: “I would’ve never released the sanctions before there was consistent evidence of compliance.”
Abortion
Rubio: “Future generations will look back at this history of our country and call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave the chance to live.”
Walker: “I’ve always been pro-life . . . . there are many other alternatives that would protect the life of the mother. That’s been consistently proven.”
Gay Marriage
Kasich: “If one of my daughters happened to be that [gay] then of course I would love them and accept them because you know what?"
Paul: “I don’t want my marriage or my guns registered in Washington.
Foreign Policy and National Security
Paul: “Each one of my budgets has taken a meat ax to foreign aid because I think we ought to quit sending it to countries that hate us."
Carson: “We’ve gotten into this mindset of fighting politically correct wars. There’s no such thing as a politically correct war. The left, of course, will say … Carson doesn’t believe in fighting stupid wars. And what we have to remember is we want to utilize the tremendous intellect we have in the military to win wars.”
