An extraordinary thing is happening on Capitol Hill: Congress is actually governing. And the fact that this is news shows you just how dysfunctional the House and Senate have become. But for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), it should be a point of personal pride that after 30 long years, they might just preside over the first set of formal budgets since before Y2K.

That’s no small feat in two chambers where the margins are about as wide as a dog whisker. Both leaders’ ability to corral their members and move incredibly intricate legislation is nothing short of a miracle in the icy climate of the two parties. And while the two men would be the first to warn that the toughest bills are yet to come, the outlook for “regular order” is more promising than we’ve seen in decades.

“I feel cautiously optimistic,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told reporters. “If you don’t believe you can get there, you certainly won’t, so I’m not expecting a CR [continuing resolution].” By now, most Americans have learned to associate those two letters — CR — with an inordinate amount of heartburn. These are the funding bridges that Congress has been in the habit of passing when they’re up against a government shutdown. But the way the system was designed was for the two chambers to write, debate, agree on, and pass appropriations bills one by one, send them to the president, and formally set the spending levels for the next year.

As the speaker himself has told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Congress hasn’t had the patience, diligence, or the courage to tackle these 12 bills. “It takes a long time to reach consensus and equilibrium on all the various competing ideas and priorities that people have,” Johnson pointed out. “[But that’s also] why the regular order, regular process is so important. You have to let everybody have a say. So they’ll be with you on the vote at the end. And that’s kind of the grueling process of every day in a deliberative body.”

But the reality, his colleague Rep. Chuck Fleishmann (R-Tenn.) pointed out, is that Congress just can’t skate from CR to CR or bloated, unread omnibus to bloated, unread omnibus. Why? Well, look at it this way, he told Perkins. “A family has a budget, but those needs change [from] year from year. They may add a child. They may have a new job. The needs of the country change year to year, for example. I think we’re in a much more dangerous world. … And Congress is supposed to do its job and address that,” he insisted.

“If we fail,” Fleishmann noted, “we get a continuing resolution, which is basically a repeat of the prior fiscal year. So it wouldn’t work for a family. It certainly doesn’t work for a country. And God forbid if we get into a situation where we fail totally. And that has happened [in my tenure],” the Tennessean lamented, “where we’ve had a government shutdown, and then our troops are at peril because they don’t get paid. We have so many different issues. And then, unfortunately, it costs so much more money to reopen the government. So ideally, we will get a budget done with the House, with the Senate, and the president can sign it.”

So far so good, although longtime Hill observers would caution against counting your appropriations bills before they’re hatched. While the House has usually been the workhorse, doing the heavy lifting and passing a number of these bills, they’ve had to watch countless proposals die in the Senate over the years. This time around, Johnson has a true partner in Thune, who seems just as determined to get the legislation over the finish line.

As of this week, the speaker’s chamber finished 75% of the work, passing eight of the 12 appropriations (six of which have already cleared the Senate). The problem now is two-fold: 1) the budgets left on the to-do list are the most contentious (especially as Democrats threaten to withhold new Homeland Security dollars over ICE’s actions), and 2) Congress only has until January 30 to finish its work — and that includes a 10-day Senate recess that just began.

In other words, time is short, and goodwill may be even shorter. There’s also the problem of hundreds of millions of dollars in problematic earmarks, which FRC’s Government Affairs team highlighted in a piece about the woke ideology Democrats are trying to sneak into this last basket of appropriations, including:

• $60 million in earmarks that would go to entities that provide or refer for abortions
• $32 million that would go to hospitals and organizations that directly carry out “gender transition” procedures or affirm radical gender identity
• $215 million slated for groups that publicly support extreme LGBT ideology

As FRC’s Chantel Hoyt and Mikaela McLeanstress, “Americans should especially not be forced to fund entities that participate in or advocate for ending unborn life, inflicting lasting harm on individuals struggling with their sex and identity, or push other partisan, far-left causes.” Of course, even the Senate’s Democrats understand that this type of social engineering would never survive in the House, so conservatives will continue to push to strip these from the chamber’s final versions.

In the meantime, longtime politicos know what a seismic shift this is in the Hill’s thinking. As Punchbowl pointed out, “This is an important moment for appropriators to show they can still pass bipartisan spending bills and reassert congressional authority over the nation’s purse strings. Cole said during a Rules Committee hearing that passing these spending bills is best for Congress as an institution.”

FRC’s Quena González agrees. “Despite the pressure to stay with the dysfunctional (but lucrative) system of passing massive ‘omnibus’ spending packages, Speaker Johnson and Leader Thune continue to push for ‘regular order,’ in which each spending bill is individually considered by the relevant committee. This is exactly what the speaker promised at the beginning of his tenure,” he reminded people.

Ever the optimist, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) suggested that even the most contentious debates could be wrapped up in time. “Maybe by next week we’ll finish,” he offered. Others aren’t so sure. Either way, Johnson reiterated, “This is how appropriations is supposed to work. We cannot govern by CR or omnibus. When we do that, it also loses Congress’s opportunity and credibility. And so, we’re really proud about rebuilding this muscle memory.” He paused before adding, “I promised when I became speaker to jump-start this. It’s taken a while, but we are finally moving that boulder up the hill.”