With 32 minutes to go until the federal government shutdown, the President signed the Continuing Resolution to keep the lights on and the government funded until November 17th.

Shutdown averted. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but it got done. Now it’s time for lawmakers to roll up their sleeves and get to the business of passing the dozen spending bills to fund government before the deadline. Some compromises will have to be made, but they have already agreed to topline funding levels for defense and non-defense discretionary spending back in July and that should be the starting place.

This won’t be easy. House Speaker McCarthy (R-CA) decided to be the “adult in the room” and muscle a “clean” CR through the House on Saturday, hours before the looming shutdown. It took hundreds of Democrats to pass the CR, but it still received a majority of support from the Republican caucus (126-90). So that seemed like something to build on. Yet a mere three days later, a handful of mostly hard-right Republicans who would rather shutdown government than govern in a bipartisan manner, joined with the minority party Democrats to oust Speaker McCarthy from the Speaker’s Chair by a vote of 216-210. 210 House Republicans (95 percent) voted against this maneuver. Speaker votes are party-line affairs, so this is quite an extraordinary event in the House Republican Conference. This is unprecedented. The House of Representatives and the U.S. are in uncharted territories. Oh, and former-Speaker McCarthy has announced he won’t run for Speaker again.

As the parliamentary sideshow continues, the shutdown clock has restarted. But for those concerned about the overall budget and debt trajectory—like us—it’s important to remember that Fiscal Year 2024 discretionary appropriations is not the final bite at the apple. There are still 15 months left in the 118th Congress, leaving many opportunities to steer our ship of state toward fiscally responsible shores. Whether the 2024 spending bills wrap up next week, next month, or even early next year, the Fiscal Year 2025 budget and appropriations process is right around the corner. This same set of actors will go through the spending melodrama one more time before the next election.

But it’s not just about annual appropriations. Lawmakers need to push for greater budgetary and fiscal reforms. Our debt path is unsustainable. And while discretionary appropriations are important, lawmakers need to focus on the real drivers of debt: Congress’s unwillingness to make tough decisions.

It’s not ideology, it’s math: Congress must reduce the cost growth in entitlements. Most of these programs are untouchable and nearly every politician currently elected, or running to be elected, has taken entitlement reform off the table. But it must happen at some point or by law benefits get cut. Congress could start by punting to a commission with real teeth and also addressing the other side of the equation—revenue. The public does not support a cuts-only approach. Decades of trying have shown that you can’t cut taxes and increase spending and expect magic to happen deficits to shrink.

Reps. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) and Scott Peters (D-CA) have introduced a fiscal commission bill with a bipartisan group of 13 co-sponsors. True, commissions don’t always (often) amount to much, but there have been notable successes. It all comes back to the political will to enact their recommendations. And there are plenty of recommendations to start with from previous commission forays. Sure, they didn’t get adopted then, but the nation wasn’t $33 trillion in debt then either. When Simpson-Bowles released their report in December 2010, the total national debt was only $13.8 trillion.

But it is more basic than a commission. True leadership requires finding savings close to home. You can’t increase spending in partisan or parochial areas while finding “savings” only in things your opponent likes. The Farm Bill is a great example. Focusing intensely on nutrition spending reform while demanding a $50 billion expansion of the farm income safety net program isn’t real reform. Even if you want to increase the federal role in guaranteeing farm income (which you shouldn’t), we simply can’t afford it. Also, every natural disaster doesn’t require more money, especially if there is an existing safety net in place. More “emergency” money isn’t always the solution. Labeling it an “emergency” doesn’t change the way debt piles up, so offsetting true emergency spending with cuts in less critical areas (pay to patch your roof by not upgrading your bathroom) is a needed change.

We still have significant capacity to invest in programs that work. But we must be honest about what is at stake and what it will take to put us on sounder financial footing. Refusal to compromise won’t cut it. It’s easier, but legislating isn’t supposed to be easy. Sticking to your principles is important, but one of those principles should be respect for the interests and needs of others and a willingness to move forward when reality shows that the costs of intransigence are high with the likelihood of reward next to nothing.