By Todd Beamon and John Bachman

House Speaker John Boehner long ago abandoned his role as leader of the Republican Party, best-selling author and leading political analyst Dick Morris declared to Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.

“I’m very disappointed at what John Boehner is doing,” Morris, a former top consultant to former President Bill Clinton, tells Newsmax. “Boehner’s made his deals. Basically, he’s no longer the speaker of the Republican majority.

“He’s, essentially, going to rubber stamp whatever [President Barack] Obama hands him, with some minor things to save face,” Morris said.

As such, the Ohio Republican, Morris said, has effectively undermined such core GOP principles as no tax hikes or revenue increases that swept them into the majority in the 2010 elections.

“What Boehner has basically done is tell the House Republicans, ‘I don’t care if you oppose a bill, I can pass it with a few people who are loyal to me in the Republican House — 40 or 50 of them — and a unanimous Democratic vote.

“So, in effect, he’s become a coalition speaker of liberal Republicans and the Democrats, and he’s no longer the speaker of the Republican Party,” Morris added. “The Tea Party Republicans welcome that, because they say: ‘Look, we know we have to raise the debt limit. We know we have to increase some revenues, and we know all that — but we want to vote against it so we can fight back primary fights in our own district. So please, please, please, let us off the hook. Let us condemn you, let us vote against you and pass it anyway. We’re not going to be upset.’

“And that’s essentially what’s going on in the House today — and it’s a total sellout of the principles of the 2010 election, and it is outrageous,” Morris said.

“The other interesting thing that’s going on is everybody’s focusing on gun control,” he added. “The issue is not ‘will the Republicans pass gun control?’ The issue is ‘will Harry Reid pass gun control?’ He was endorsed by the [National Rifle Association] when he ran in 2010. That endorsement saved his bacon; he publicized it all over the place — and it was an incredibly unusual endorsement, one of very few Democrats they endorsed.

“I don’t think Harry Reid dare pass the Obama assault gun ban.”

Morris noted how Reid’s been “silent” on the various gun proposals introduced in the Senate this week. “And Boehner, for once, is doing it right: He’s saying, ‘Hey, pass it in the Senate and then we’ll talk,’ because he knows that the Democrats are going to kill it in the Senate, not the Republicans.”

Morris is the author of “REVOLT! How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs – A Patriot’s Guide” and “Here Come the Black Helicopters.”

He said another American leader who is in a crisis is Obama.

“He’s becoming very arrogant and very convinced that it’s his way or the highway. That’s going to come back to haunt him,” Morris said.

“In general, the second terms of presidents are very bad. The last successful one was Theodore Roosevelt, and the reason is they get arrogant, they overreach. They think they can sell a League of Nations treaty. They think they can sell a [Supreme] Court-packing plan. They think they can get away with high causalities in Korea. They think they can get away with absentee government, Watergate, Monica Lewinsky.

“The list is very long — Iraq — and I think the same hubris that affected previous second-term presidents will probably affect him.”

Morris, too, was troubled by how divisive Obama’s inaugural speech was.

“When he got up to the stuff about the legacy we leave the next generation, I was expecting him to talk about the debt. Instead, he talked about climate change.

“There was a juxtaposition between his first and his second inaugural address that I thought captured the fundamental difference,” Morris added. “In the first inaugural address in ’09, he said we have been dutied to carry on the work of our forefathers who fought and conquered at Gettysburg, at Normandy, and at Khe Sanh in Vietnam.

“This time, he said, we have a duty to follow in the footsteps of those who pioneered our rights — at Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall. So it was blacks, women and gays, as opposed to the previous speech, which was Americans. In a sense, what he’s really done is take the American people and vulcanized them, atomized them into little bitty parts — and he’s dealing with each petechial part rather than dealing with the whole.”

Turning his attention to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony to Congress earlier this week on the Sept. 11 attacks at the U.S. consulate in Libya, Morris described those who questioned the nation’s top diplomat as “pathetic.”

“The essence of what this hearing should be about was that the president and secretary of state and the U.N. ambassador lied to the American people and pretended that this was a demonstration against a movie that went awry and erupted into violence — and then engaged in two weeks of public soul-searching about censorship in America,” Morris said. “And, nobody mentioned that. It wasn’t until [California GOP Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher,  in the House hearing, half the way through, that issue was mentioned.”

Clinton, he said, sought to cover up “a failure of leadership” by attributing the Benghazi assault as “a systemic failure. But if you’re the boss of a company for four years, any systemic failures are leadership failures because you didn’t correct them.

“She had this sort of ‘it-wasn’t-my-department attitude,’” Morris added, noting that Clinton had testified that she had nothing to do with security issues at the consulate. “Nonsense. The head of every agency controls and deals with the security of that agency, particularly when you’re dealing with high-threat areas. This will tarnish her legacy as secretary of state.

He labeled the Democratic senators on the committees that questioned Clinton “puppets” — adding that they had based their questions on “talking points” from Clinton, each of whom “read their piece of it. It was like a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. Everybody gets their own portion of the Torah. They call it a ‘haftarah’ to read. Each senator got his talking points about that.

“That was in an effort to bolster her legacy,” Morris said. “But Benghazi has to be a real blot on her legacy.”

Further, Clinton’s questioners were “scared to death” of her — and criticized Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s performance in particular.

“They were just intimidated by her — and just like [GOP presidential candidate Mitt] Romney was in not raising it in the third debate — that may have cost him the election in part.

“Here we have a president, eight weeks before an election, who knowingly, consciously, lies to the American people — and a secretary of state as well, even though they have on their desks an intelligence report that says this was al-Qaida and that these were terrorists.

“They redact those two words,” he added. “They issue the talking points without that — and then for two weeks, they lie to the American people until, finally, the truth emerges.

“This is what these hearings should have been about, and nobody except Rohrabacher had the guts to put it that way.”

Referring to Rubio, Morris added: “He was pathetic in those hearings. He had his five minutes to talk about Hillary — and he talked about some arcane question of did you get this certain memo or didn’t you. It was ridiculous. John McCain put him to shame, and it makes me wonder if Rubio would be a good Republican nominee.”

Morris said Clinton’s nominated successor, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, would make “a tremendously flawed secretary of state.”

“He does not understand the importance of being aggressive in dealing with Iran. His whole approach in the Middle East has been remarkably evenhanded to treat Palestinians and Israelis the same, even though if the Israelis laid down their guns. There would be no more Israel — and if the Arabs laid down their guns, there would be no more war.

“He’s going to get confirmed because he’s not Susan Rice — and Susan Rice’s conduct on Benghazi, where she echoed the lies fed to her by Obama and Hillary, stopped her from being appointed or confirmed.”

In his wide-ranging interview with Newsmax, Morris also said:

The GOP must deal decisively with the immigration issue once and for all. “The Republican Party has got to get rid of this immigration issue. It’s got to pass enough so that it goes away — and it can no longer sit there and drive Latinos into the arms of the Democratic Party.”

Any comprehensive immigration reform plan put forth by Rubio risks being upstaged by Obama. “Rubio’s plan is essentially to let them work but have a longer waiting period and a separate procedure to let them vote and let them become citizens. Nobody crosses that border in order to vote.”

Obama’s economic policies are misguided. “I’m not in favor of rich people getting richer. I don’t think that’s particularly important for this country. I don’t think that we should be serving those interests. I care about it because it affects the economy. When you let rich people keep more of their money, they hire more people.”

And Obama’s State of the Union address next month is going to be a carbon copy of his inaugural speech. “This has been his agenda all along. When he was inaugurated the first time, he was soft-soaping us to pull the wool over our eyes — and now that he’s re-elected and he’s got at least the Senate and a supine House,” Morris said. “To put it nicely, he’s determined to ride rough shod and pass his entire agenda. The issue is how the Republicans deal with it.”

For more on this story go to:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/boehner-obama-dick-morris/2013/01/25/id/473041