After weeks talking with his rank-and-file about what concessions they\u2019d 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 \u2014 both lawmakers and senior aides \u2014 privately thought about these ideas.\nFirst, a caveat: Don\u2019t expect top Democrats to applaud any of these ideas on record right now. The party line, we\u2019re told, remains and will continue to be to resist giving Republicans any concessions \u2014 particularly since they raised the debt ceiling three times under Donald Trump without conditions.\nDemocrats and the White House will also continue to demand McCarthy lay out and pass a budget to prove that he\u2019s even worth negotiating with, we\u2019re told. There\u2019s a concern that even if Democrats cut a deal with McCarthy, he won\u2019t be able to deliver votes given his limited hold on the GOP conference.\nMcCarthy\u2019s letter, meanwhile, did not impress Democrats. One senior aide called it nothing more than a \u201cpathetic\u201d 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.\nBut 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 \u2026\xa0\nSubscribe to the POLITICO Playbook newsletter\nRaghu Manavalan is the host and senior editor of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing.Jenny Ament is the executive producer of POLITICO Audio.