 The government shutdown has been avoided in tonight's CSIS Sheeper Series panel discussed the implications of that budget battle and the path moving forward. I'm joined now by longtime congressman Vin Weber. Congressman, the panel tonight discussed the next big vote, that budget for 2012. What are the challenges in doing that? Well, we have the divided government. Republicans control the House, Democrats control the presidency, Democrats control the Senate, but the way the rules are, it's about 50-50, so you can't really do anything unless you can bring the two parties together. We face, everybody agrees, a very serious long-term fiscal crisis in terms of debt and deficits and spending and things like that. Unfortunately, the two parties totally disagree on how we should solve that problem. The question is, as hard as we had to struggle to get this continuing resolution to keep the government from closing down, does that mean that we are doomed to not succeed in putting together agreements on these much bigger issues down the road? Or is that going to be an indicator that we actually can come together and solve some of these problems? And we're just not sure yet. Now, Senator Warner said that he does see a silver lining on this black cloud of these negotiations that have been very partisan. Do you agree? Well, I think so. I think that the two parties have been forced to come together and come up with an agreement. They did in December on taxes and a couple of other issues, and they did recently on this continuing resolution issue. So there's a basis for working together. There certainly is an understood seriousness by the leaders of both parties, the president, leaders of the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Congress, of the seriousness of our problem, of the need to come together. But leaders have to be able to bring along followers, and that's the question going forward. Can they bring their followers along and solve this long-term budget problem? And all of these negotiations also brought up the topic of civility in Congress today amongst this very prestigious panel of former senators and yourself. What is it going to take for there to be a return to the civility that you once knew? I don't know that it's easy to accomplish in any event. There's so many reasons why the environment is more polarized and more inflammatory than it used to be. It goes to the living arrangements of members of Congress who don't live in Washington anymore. It includes the media and the blogosphere and talk radio and campaign finance laws and everything else like that. I don't want to be a pessimist, but I think that we're going to have to figure out how to manage our way through this very difficult environment, because if we're just going to wait until we solve this problem, we may be waiting a long time. Well, thank you very much, Congressman. You can see our full panel on csis.org and on iTunes U.