OK, OK, this will all be repeated in three months. OK, OK, we're going to have a couple of months of theatre about budget 'negotiations'. We might even get a consensus proposal out of the conference committee. All great and good.
So what? This wasn't Appomattox Courthouse. This was Gettysburg, where after several days of repulses on the flanks, the invaders launched a direct charge up the middle, and, in the process, lost the battle. This was the Fall of Vicksburg (coincidentally, on the same day). There's a lot of fighting left. We haven't won -- but if we keep fighting, we will win.
But the seditionists have had their high water mark on one front, and have felt the first real break in their natural defenses on the other. They need to resources of the less crazy Republicans to continue their attack, and the less crazy Republicans have been split off from the hard core of the farthest right. From here on in, we need to turn their defeats into attacks: defeat the attackers by simple numbers in elections in Virginia and North Carolina, while fracturing the far right coalition by strengthening the voter rolls of Democratic voters in the more radical far South.
It isn't over, no. But like our first Civil War, we've split the South, and now we need to keep up the pressure over time. At the end, the Union is going to win this one, just as it won that one.