The past two years have seen two high-profile Congressional battles over public spending, the first in 2011 over raising the debt ceiling and the second in 2012 and the early hours of 2013 over the so-called fiscal cliff. Both of these events contributed to the sentiment that Congress has become an all-too-partisan organization, incapable of crossing party lines until the eleventh hour. The first of these caused Standard & Poor’s to—perhaps questionably— downgrade the United States’ credit rating from AAA to AA+, and the latter caused the organization to remark that it was justified in doing so. Last week, however, Republicans proposed and passed legislation that is expected to be signed into law and conceivably marks an end to the unpleasant era of brinkmanship the country has been witnessing.

House Resolution 325 (H.R. 325), awkwardly named “A bill to ensure the complete and timely payment of the obligations of the United States Government until May 19, 2013, and for other purposes,” and colloquially referred to as the “No Budget, No Pay” measure, does two things: first, it suspends the debt ceiling until May 18, and second, it delays the paychecks of members of Congress until the end of the current session if their chamber fails to pass a concurrent budget (a budget that both the House and the Senate have agreed on).

The passage of this bill—which the White House views favorably, and which Senate Democrats are all but guaranteed to approve—marks a significant departure from current methods of dealing with government spending. By suspending the debt ceiling until May 18, Congress will be giving itself an additional three months to grapple with the problem of reducing the near-trillion dollar deficit (down from 1.2 trillion thanks to the expiration of a few Bush-era tax cuts). Currently, the U.S. is expected to hit its borrowing limit in mid-February, so this move represents a shift from the practice of waiting until the last minute before dealing with important legislative issues.

Of course, were that provision alone all that will be passed, there would be little cause to hope. Congress had a year and a half to deal with the fiscal cliff, for example, but chose not to begin discussions in earnest until after the November elections (although given the nature of American politics, whether or not individual members of Congress can be blamed for this is debatable). H.R.325, however, contains a provision that has been discussed for a few years but has never before been implemented. By threatening to withhold members’ pay if their chamber does not pass a budget, Congress is forcing itself to take a new approach to the deficit. President Barack Obama has regularly submitted budgets to Congress for consideration, and the House has repeatedly passed budgets, but the Senate has not done so in four years.

In passing this bill, Congress and the president will turn the deficit debate from a game of using something as ridiculous as a threat of default to being centered on fulfilling its legal obligations. Lest anyone claim that Congress will make no attempt to pass a budget until the last possible moment, Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-WA, has announced that she will immediately begin working on creating a budget to be passed by the Senate, and her counterpart in the House, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, will do the same.

The bill is far from perfect. It harms the few members of Congress who rely on their salaries for income. Still, it is doubtful that members of Congress would be so callous as to deprive members of their own party of pay, and the fact that pay will be withheld unless both chambers can agree on a budget bodes well for one being passed. And as the Democrat-controlled Senate would not pass anything the president would veto, it is a safe bet that any concurrent budget resolution would be signed into law, complete with spending cuts, tax increases and, perhaps, an agreement to raise the debt ceiling in May.