VIDEO: Newt Gingrich Visits CBS THIS MORNING

Former House Speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt said the President is "deliberately seeking" for a fight on debt ceiling during an interview with co-hosts Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell that was broadcast, today, Jan. 15, 2013, on CBS THIS MORNING on the CBS Television Network (7:00 AM – 9:00 AM). Check out the video!

Below are excerpts from the interview:

O'DONNELL: Good to be with you. And you say that fighting over the debt ceiling is a bad idea for congressional Republicans. Why?

GINGRICH: Because in the end, it's a threat they can't sustain. No one is going to default. No one is going to allow the United States to not pay its bills. No one is going to accept the economic costs. It rallies the entire business community to the President's side. And the fact is, the Republicans have two much better arenas in which to fight over spending. They have a continuing resolution which funds government which comes up at the end of March, and they have the sequester, which automatically cuts spending unless it's dealt with. And 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.

O'DONNELL: But Speaker Boehner said yesterday that the American people do not support raising the debt ceiling without reducing government spending at the same time. So do you disagree with Speaker Boehner?

GINGRICH: I think that if you get involved in a head-on fight over the debt ceiling and people begin to ask about defaulting which is what the consequences of the – if the President's truly stubborn, the Congress is truly stubborn, you get a default. At that point, the pressure in the Congress just becomes a dead loser. At this point, all these different groups come together and say you have to pass this. I don't think we should pick fights where we are in a position that we can't, in fact, in the end enforce our will, because we have no evidence that Barack Obama's going to compromise. Nothing he's done in the last couple of months would imply that he's going to compromise.

ROSE: Therefore do you agree that the President is right in not negotiating?

GINGRICH: No. I think the President's wrong, but here's a fact. I think this President is deliberately seeking confrontation. I think he's going out of his way to bully the House Republicans. And I think the House Republicans ought to pick the continuing resolution and the sequester which are places where they are totally within their grounds. They don't have to pay for any of his government.