With the Republican field reshaped by the suspension of Herman Cain’s campaign, six Republican presidential candidates tried to show their conservative credentials during a policy-heavy forum shown on Fox News Channel on Saturday night.  The forum came as a new poll in Iowa showed Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, leading the pack in that state with just more than four weeks to go before the voting there. And this week will be a busy one for the candidates, with a forum before Jewish leaders and a debate Saturday hosted by ABC News in Des Moines. Hanging over the field is the question of whether Mr. Gingrich can seize on his ascent in the polls and possibly pick up some of Mr. Cain’s conservative support.  Saturday’s forum had a gantlet of three conservative state attorneys general peppering the candidates with questions. Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, was pressed on how conservatives can “trust that a President Gingrich will not advance these sorts of big government approaches” that he had advocated, including his one-time support for a mandate that citizens obtain health insurance. Mr. Gingrich noted that he did so in league with other conservatives and that “every conservative has in fact left that kind of a model.”  Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota was asked how she would carry out her call to remove all illegal immigrants living in the United States or pay an estimated cost of $135 billion to do so. “It would be enforcement both at the border but also by the ICE agents,” she said.  And Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was asked pointed questions about his health care overhaul there, and what he would say to President Obama if Mr. Obama were to note during a general election debate its similarities to the federal health care law so hated by Republicans. “Why didn’t you give me a call?” he said, reprising a well-worn line from the campaign trail.  The candidates faced these sharp questions from a roster of attorneys general who have filed legal cases against the 2009 health care law: Pam Bondi of Florida, who brought the original suit the Supreme Court has agreed to hear; Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia, who has been a spokesman for legal action against the law; and Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma. They were gathered by the Fox News host — and 2008 Republican presidential candidate — Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas.  It was one of the more substantive television events in the Republican contest so far, set up as a forum where candidates faced the panel solo and did not directly interact, leaving the intraparty politics largely out of it, with the exception of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who urged the television audience to give him “a second look.” That was a tacit acknowledgment of his drop in polls and, perhaps, a new opportunity after Herman Cain’s decision earlier Saturday to suspend his campaign.  The attorneys general, new to presidential debate-style politics, were hardly cowed by their appearance on national television. Nor did they let their own general ideological agreement with the candidates get in the way of tough questions about how they would carry out their proposals. But the attorneys general seemed to give Mr. Gingrich the hardest time.  He was grilled on calls he has made to abolish certain federal courts — liberal ones whose rulings he disagrees with. It is a position that invariably wins applause from conservative audiences, but the attorneys general, conservative Republicans all, seemed to raise a collective eyebrow.  Mr. Cuccinelli made it clear that he had big disagreements with Mr. Gingrich, asking him how he would assure conservatives “like me” that his less ideologically pure positions would not trickle into his White House. For instance, he asked how Mr. Gingrich would “filter out what I would consider to be the nonconservative, nonlimited government ideas that you produce.”  Mr. Gingrich said he would introduce a “very clearly philosophically driven program” that would train his appointees and inform them “this is where this administration is going.”  Mr. Romney easily parried questions about the Massachusetts health care law that he championed, repeating his argument that his policy was less ambitious and did not seek to upend the health care system the way he said Mr. Obama had hoped the federal law would. He added that his law was generally devised to help those who were uninsured.  “What the president has done is way beyond what we envisioned,” he said.  Mr. Cuccinelli stayed with his line of questioning. “You would agree, wouldn’t you,” he said, “what you did in that bill in Massachusetts in 2006 affected the entire industry. Correct?”  Mr. Romney said that “for the 92 percent of us that were already insured, nothing changed.”  The attorneys general were consistent in asking the candidates to defend the viability of their policies.  For instance, Mr. Cuccinelli asked Ms. Bachmann how she would handle environmental disagreements across state lines if she were to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. When Ms. Bachmann answered that “a lot of these cases would be negotiated,” he pressed, “You cannot just negotiate without a legal foundation and thereby compel both sides to participate.”  Ms. Bondi, stating that the Obama administration’s policies “would impose staggering costs on the American people,” asked former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania which environmental regulations he would allow. Mr. Santorum said the problem was that environmental laws that have been on the books for decades — he cited the Endangered Species Act — were overly broad, allowing regulators to craft many rules. “This is what the left is best at,” he said, promising to have Congress rewrite the laws to be much narrower.  Mr. Pruitt asked Representative Ron Paul of Texas about his opposition to the Patriot Act. Mr. Paul responded by saying, “Are you going to put cameras in every household or whatever?  “I don’t think it’s a lack of laws that are our problem.”
During a forum on Saturday night, six Republican candidates responded directly to questions by three attorneys general, and did not address one another.