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Ingraham: Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, yesterday and the day before has been taking Republicans to task for wanting to put forth a new strategy in dealing with these debt limit talks. I asked Mitch McConnell about Newt Gingrich’s criticism on yesterday’s show:

McConnell: Just like we knew shutting down the government in 1995 was not going to work for us, it helped Bill Clinton get reelected and I refuse to help Obama get reelected.

Ingraham: And he went on to say Newt Gingrich basically took it to the brink at one point and that turned out to be very difficult for Republicans. Joining us now, Newt Gingrich. Newt great to talk to you.

@0:37 - Gingrich: It’s great to talk to you Laura and I always find it interesting how Washington rewrites history. The fact is that the House Republicans had not been reelected since 1928. After the Government was shutdown, after we got through a welfare reform bill, after we began moving to balance the federal budget, for the first time in 68 years the Republicans were reelected to the House as a majority in 1996. The fact is that Bill Clinton won the presidential race, but I don’t think that had anything to do with what happened in November and December of 1995. Remember that Clinton come in to the State of the Union and announces that the era of big government is over. Clinton is moving to cut spending, to agree to a tax cut for the first time in 16 years, to balance the budget and he signs welfare reform in the summer of 1996 all of which were being pushed on him by a conservative House Republican Party.

Ingraham: There is no doubt, there is no doubt that the Republican stand on principle of economic sanity that that pushed Clinton to the middle, no doubt about it. We don’t need to go back and revisit all of that. I think the point that he was making is that the political reality today is what it is.

@2:05 - Gingrich: But Laura, what is the political reality. You have the Republicans, at least Senator McConnell, offering to cave before the president have vetoed anything, before the House Republicans have passed anything, there are 25 different things you can do to balance off the president that don’t require caving. For example, the president says senior citizens won’t get their checks, so the House Republicans could immediately pass a Social Security payment guarantee bill that says that every Social Security check will have the highest priority and ranking equal to paying the debt and therefore they will be paid in August no matter what and then let the Senate Democrats block a Social Security payment guarantee bill. Now there are a lot of different things you could do to match, you could only raise the debt ceiling for August and you can offer enough pending cuts.

Ingraham: But Obama is saying, I understand that Newt, but the president has said he’s not doing that, and you saw the Quinnipiac poll that came out, that just came out about an hour ago, voters would blame Congressional Republicans more than the Obama administration if the debt ceiling is not raised, it just came out. 48% of those polled said Republicans would be mainly responsible if the debt ceiling is not raised compared to 34% who said the Obama administration would be at fault. The big game is getting rid of Obama, you gotta save this economy, but you are never going to be able to get him [Obama] to agree to the types of things you want to do. He’s not going to be Newt Gingrich as President of the United States. So McConnell was trying to deal with the political reality and get this albatross of the necks of Republicans.

@3:47 - Gingrich: OK, so in effect, as long as Obama throws a temper tantrum, Republican should cave? Then what’s the point of having a legislative branch? Republicans shouldn’t be creative, they shouldn’t come up with an alternative argument, they shouldn’t try to match the president’s ability to talk to the country, so what’s the next thing he gets to blackmail them on? I mean if the new model is Obama gets to say do it my way or else and the Republicans therefore have to do what he wants. I don’t quite understand how this is going to work out over the next year and a half.

Ingraham: Well I don’t think any of it is going to work out well, but the bottom line is the Republicans have the House of Representatives, don’t have the Senate, and don’t have the presidency, and I think what McConnell is seeing is some of the polls that we’re seeing which is the people are going to blame Republicans if this thing goes into default. I’m playing devil’s advocate here, I want the government slashed now, I think this whole thing is ridiculous.

@4:45 - Gingrich: But what if the House Republicans pass a bill that guarantees you won’t go in default, but it doesn’t have any tax increases? The president says I will veto a bill that blocks default.

Ingraham: I think they should do that. I think they should do that.

Gingrich: What if they give the president the ability, you know if you look at how much we own of Nevada, what if we give the president the ability to sell 5% of our property in Nevada in order to pay for the August money. I mean, you can deal with this one month at a time. But if we give up, we throw our hands up in the air and say Harry Reid control the Senate and Barack Obama controls the news media so Republicans should be timid and cave whenever they are yelled at. I don’t see how we get through the next year.

Ingraham: You’ve known Mitch McConnell for a long time. You’re now calling Mitch McConnell timid and caving?

@5:38 - Gingrich: I’m saying that a bill which clearly will lead the president to get $2.4 Trillion in debt, which is what it will do, I mean let’s be clear the bill that is being proposed, which Harry Reid likes and Nancy Pelosi likes, is a bill which says the president can play a game, he can send up this material, he can then veto the Congressional override if there is one, and as long as he has 34 Democrats in the Senate who are willing to sustain his veto, he gets $2.4 Trillion.

Ingraham: But along the way the American people get to see what they’re all about. Which is spending, which is--if they could-- raise taxes, a complete lack of fiscal seriousness.  Three times the American people get to see them doing this. Isn’t that important, going into the 2012 elections?

@6:40 - Gingirch: Well you just told me that even though the president of the U.S. is responsible for the current mess, their ability to lie in public is more important than the republicans’ ability to tell the truth, that he’s winning 48-34? What makes you believe that the next 3 times, having lost this one, that the republicans are going to be better at this? It will become back-page news, no one will pay attention to it, they’ll get the money at virtually no cost, they’ll let every marginal democrat in the senate vote no, so they can go home and say they fundamentally opposed it. The ones who aren’t in any trouble or up for reelection will sustain the veto. As soon as this is over, it will disappear as an issue. If we’d taken this approach in 1994 we wouldn’t have balanced the budget, we wouldn’t have reformed welfare, we wouldn’t have gotten a tax cut, and we wouldn’t have brought the unemployment rate down from 5.6% to about 4%.

@7:50 - Ingraham: You know me, I’m the kind of person who wants to take it to the limit anyway. If we’re playing chicken, I’m driving 80 miles per hour right toward you. But I’m trying to see it from a more practical position, because my instinct is just to go full ahead with everything toward them and let the chips fall where they may. I’m with you on all this—I want this stuff trimmed and cut and stabilized—and simplified now. The problem is: these people still have the bully pulpit from Barack Obama. And when you see these polls, Newt, people are going to tag the republicans with this and we’re going to have a real problem in Nov 2012, when the old people didn’t get their social security checks for 2 months.

@8:40 - Gingrich: Well that’s why House republicans should pass a social security payment guarantee bill. How come no one called out President Obama on the Trust Fund? How can he tell the seniors they’re not going to get paid when there’s billions of dollars in the Trust Fund. To what degree is he proving that the Trust fund is a lie?! The house republicans have the ability to move legislation. They should.

Ingraham: Well what about military payment or Medicaid payment? Don’t you have to go down the whole line then?

@9:18 - Gingrich: Well you had raised the first group which is the one he’s been terrorizing.  They went through this fight a few weeks ago when he threatened the military. I said then—they should pass a bill to pay all the military. The CR should have funded the military for the entire year. But add those two together, military and social security. You pass the bill and send it to the senate. What does Harry Reid do at that point? Block a bill guaranteeing social security payments? Let him go on TV and defend that.

@10:00 - Ingraham: Well he was on TV this morning but basically reiterated what Pres. Obama had said. He said if there’s no deal to raise the borrowing limit by Aug 2nd, seniors will not get their social security checks.

@10:20 - Gingrich: The house should bring it up as an emergency bill,. How many Democrats are going to vote against a social security payment protection bill? Are they going to go back to their districts and say they voted against ensuring senior citizens receive their social security payments?

Ingraham: Do you think this is a problem of PR or messaging from the republicans? Is there a real fissure? Is Mitch McConnell not really a fiscal conservative?

@10:55 - Gingrich: No, I think republicans are in the habit of losing the national debate, so they work in the envelope of thinking “we’re going to lose the national debate, so what should we do.” The fact is, they should be acting. Someone on the senate republican side should stand up after Harry Reid and say, “I move to bring a social security payment guarantee bill to the floor” and have Harry Reid prove he’s lying to the American people by blocking the bill.

@11:30 - Gingrich: You’ve got to be as aggressive. This is like the old UCLA coach, John Wooden, who’s strategy was based on the idea that you have to get up every morning and compete all day. If we had the current attitude in 1994, we wouldn’t have balanced the budget, we would not have reformed welfare and Medicare, and we sure wouldn’t have cut taxes because we would have gotten up and said, “Bill Clinton is going to beat us” and “we’re too afraid of getting beaten up in public. “

@12:00 - Ingraham: Newt, guess what we know—if the republicans didn’t have the House and there was no majority there and the tea party hadn’t risen up, there would never be a discussion about this, spending cuts, trimming government. They would already have raised the debt ceiling and be spending more and taxing us more.

@12:18 - Gingrich: I was doing a tea party event in South Carolina the other day and I can tell you, the several hundred people who were there don’t want to see the Republican Party give into Barack Obama. They want to see them stand up and be clever about it. What they need to do right now is pass a Social security payment guarantee bill.

@12:36 - Ingraham:  They’re smart people though, why aren’t they doing this?

Gingrich: Because they start with a premise that they’re going to lose and I start with a premise that the American people can win.