(CNN) For years, Republicans defined themselves as distinct from Democrats by saying they alone had a commitment to fiscal discipline. They even created the budget mechanisms to all but guarantee that federal spending levels decline for at least a decade to come.

The new budget agreement President Trump signed into law blows a hole in that ongoing promise and marks a new era in federal spending. It temporary does away with the mechanisms put in place to control spending and replaces the 2011 GOP of the tea party with the 2018 GOP that controls all levers of the federal government. It makes an attempt to arrive at the fiscal baseline Republicans tried to make a legislative mandate in 2011 even more a remote possibility.

These spending levels are achieved by temporarily lifting automatic spending cuts Congress put in place to force itself to make difficult spending cuts. But it turned out even the specter of automatic cuts wasn't enough. For years, lawmakers have passed temporary spending to exceed the sequestration layer of caps. (The caps were not originally meant to go into effect, but rather spur the parties to work together and control spending.) The bill Trump signed Friday breaks through both cap levels enacted as a result of the 2011 legislation and sequestration.

The remarkable part of this is that for years Republicans stood in lockstep that they would never accept debt levels this high. This bill is a break from that rhetoric.