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Hey there, it's Playbook editor Mike DeBonez.

To kick off the week, Playbook co-author, Rachel Bade is here for today's Playbook

Daily Briefing.

All right, Rachel, the big things we're looking at today.

Number one, Congress is back this week.

The Senate took two weeks off.

The House took one week off.

Number one on the list, the debt limit. We hit the debt limit last week on Thursday. The Treasury Department is now using extraordinary measures to keep the country from defaulting on its debt. What are we looking at this week, particularly on the debt limit issue?

So this week we're going to see Democratic leaders saying publicly that they want Republicans

to go out and vote on legislation, specifically detailing what kind of cuts they want to raise the debt ceiling.

The hope by Democratic leaders is basically that they can get Republicans on the record proposing things that are not going to be

popular with voters, things like cuts to Social Security, cuts to Medicare, et cetera, food stamps,

and that they can sort of use that to create a sort of public pressure against them to get them

to negotiate in a way that would be more helpful or sort of lead to some sort of way to raise the debt ceiling.

You're also starting to see some moderate Democrats go out there and actually challenge the White House

on this position that they're not negotiating at all. I mean, obviously, Biden has tried to say,

we're going to raise the debt ceiling. It's going to be clean. We're not going to attach any spending cuts to it. But people like Joe Manchin and Josh Gottheimer over the weekend said that that is not a tenable position. And they've got to have conversations about doing some sort of negotiation. Right. And it seems like, you know, how long are we going to stay in this sort of shadow boxing phase where each side sort of does their sort of posturing, you know, the White House says, oh, we're not

going to negotiate. The Republicans say, oh, you know, we have to, you know, do these dramatic cuts

and, et cetera, et cetera. And when do these conversations actually start happening productively?

I, for one, don't think we're anywhere

close to that. I think we're in for another two or three months of theatrics before we get there.

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