The Biden-McCarthy debt limit deal is a modest step forward for responsible governance and should be swiftly approved by Congress for several reasons, especially because it is needed to prevent a damaging default. The U.S. government has never failed to pay all of its bills, and never should.

And yet, the self-evident and compelling case for supporting the measure seems to have been lost on some in Congress. There are opponents on both sides of the aisle, but the loudest appear to be in the ranks of House and Senate Republicans. Their denunciations fit a pattern.

Over a period spanning about 30 years, a cluster of aligned groups in and out of Congress have made their reputations by standing against nearly every necessary budgetary compromise, of which there have been many. Indeed, opposition to what is plainly required (because there are no alternatives) has become so predictable in certain quarters that it almost did not matter what was in the current deal. They were going to stand against it irrespective of the details.

In this particular instance, the arguments of the opponents fall especially flat. A Biden-McCarthy deal was never going to be groundbreaking, given that taxes and entitlement spending were off the table (at the insistence, by the way, of many strong supporters of former President Donald Trump). Yet, even with these constraints, what emerged is a package of adjustments that will bring some much-needed order, and modest discipline, to budgetary decision-making for two years.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) , the whole package will reduce federal borrowing by $1.5 trillion over 10 years mostly by holding down appropriated spending. In 2024 and 2025, the bill reinstates enforceable caps on discretionary spending, and at levels that are likely to survive challenges because they have been calibrated to be realistic. Bringing caps back into the budget process is a positive development if they have the full commitment of both parties. They can impose some restraint on spending decisions that are prone to excess when there is no upper limit imposed through the budget process.

The deal also breaks new ground by creating a device for constraining expensive administrative actions, which have largely escaped budget discipline to this point. The new provision is supposed to require offsetting savings whenever an administration approves an expensive regulation or other program liberalization, although its effectiveness has yet to be tested. Still, its inclusion in the legislation should be seen as a step forward.

It is also obvious that second-guessing the process that produced this framework is off base. The Biden administration and Speaker McCarthy’s office spent weeks negotiating the details of the legislation. Each side was responding to internal pressures and the need to come to a bipartisan agreement to avoid default. More time and different players would not have made much of a difference.

In other words, this is the best deal that could be had under the circumstances, as most members of the House and Senate seem to recognize and accept.

This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.