Gingrich wants House Republicans to seek a different fight with the president. Gingrich: Obama bullying House GOP

President Barack Obama is attempting to “bully” House Republicans over the debt ceiling, and the GOP should seek a different fight, Newt Gingrich said on Tuesday.

“This president is deliberately seeking confrontation,” Gingrich, a 2012 presidential hopeful, said on CBS’s “CBS This morning.” “I think he’s going out of his way to bully the House Republicans.”


( PHOTOS: Newt Gingrich’s career)

Gingrich said that instead of getting bogged down in a battle over raising the debt ceiling, House Republicans should find leverage by turning to continuing resolutions and the sequester.

“Asking Barack Obama not to be a big-spending, high-taxing liberal is a denial of everything we’ve learned about him in his career,” Gingrich said. “It’s much better for the House Republicans to say, ‘This is what we’re prepared to do: we’ll pass a year-long continuing resolution for national security…There are dozens of places you can dramatically change spending without having to get involved in a general crisis over the U.S. debt.”

He added that a fight over the debt ceiling doesn’t look to be one the House GOP can win.

“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,” Gingrich said. “Nothing he’s done in the last couple of months would imply that he’s going to compromise.”