Gingrich to House GOP: Quit Threatening to Default

Newt Gingrich has a message for House Republicans: Stop making empty threats. Congressional Republicans are saying they'll gladly default if President Obama doesn't agree to budget cuts as part of a debt ceiling deal, but that's "a fight they can't sustain," Gingrich said today on CBS This Morning. Because in the end, "no one is going to allow the United States to not pay its bills," and making empty threats on the matter just "rallies the entire business community to the president's side," he said. "I don't think we should pick fights where ... we can't in fact in the end enforce our will."

Gingrich suggests that, instead, the GOP focus on the $1.2 trillion cuts set to be triggered March 1, and the continuing resolution currently funding the government, which expires March 27. "Those two fronts they can fight, and they have much less resistance from the average American, and it's much harder for the president to oppose them," he explains. But he also directed criticism toward Obama, saying the president is "going out of his way to bully House Republicans." (More debt ceiling stories.)