Mar. 29, 2023: What Dems really think of the GOP’s debt demands

After weeks talking with his rank-and-file about what concessions they’d need from Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated five proposals that could maybe, just maybe, elicit an agreement. We spent yesterday working the phones to find out what Hill Democrats — both lawmakers and senior aides — privately thought about these ideas.

First, a caveat: Don’t expect top Democrats to applaud any of these ideas on record right now. The party line, we’re told, remains and will continue to be to resist giving Republicans any concessions — particularly since they raised the debt ceiling three times under Donald Trump without conditions.

Democrats and the White House will also continue to demand McCarthy lay out and pass a budget to prove that he’s even worth negotiating with, we’re told. There’s a concern that even if Democrats cut a deal with McCarthy, he won’t be able to deliver votes given his limited hold on the GOP conference.

McCarthy’s letter, meanwhile, did not impress Democrats. One senior aide called it nothing more than a “pathetic” attempt to distract from his challenge cobbling together a GOP budget, and almost everyone else said its lack of specifics made it impossible to negotiate over.

But behind the squawking, we found that there were in fact some ideas that piqued their interests. We granted anonymity to a half-dozen Democrats to candidly assess the emerging Republican proposals and whether any of them might grow legs … 

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Raghu Manavalan is the host and senior editor of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.
Jenny Ament is the executive producer of POLITICO Audio.