Coming off Veterans Day weekend, the chaos that has long been simmering in the Republican conference yet again boiled over. Out of the all the figurative backstabbing allegedly came a literal jab to the back from Kevin McCarthy to Tim Burchett, the former House speaker and a hardliner who’d voted to oust him. There was also Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, who literalized the childishness of the contemporary GOP when he angrily told Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz that he “looked like a Smurf.” And then there was Johnson, the new speaker, who had to send lawmakers home for Thanksgiving early after 19 of his far-right colleagues held up an appropriations bill.

Still, after all of the hullabaloo, Johnson's week may somehow end better than it started. His stopgap government funding plan has made it to President Joe Biden’s desk. Which means he'll avoid a government shutdown (for now), even with the gavel in hand (for now). “We’re pleased with the outcome,” Johnson said after getting his “laddered” continuing resolution through the chamber, with a little help from across the aisle.

The success merely papers over the Republican disarray, though. The problems that plagued the House GOP under McCarthy, who has denied sucker-punching Burchett, are still there under Johnson. And while he’s managed to keep the government open through the holidays without triggering a motion to vacate, he’s only kicked those standoffs down the road, into January and February.

Hardliners this week gave a preview of what those fights could look like. Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry described the stopgap as “failure theater.” Representative Bob Good emphasized his support for the speaker, but warned that “we are not going to continue to do business as usual here in Washington”—a sign, it would seem, that he’ll be on a shorter leash when the spending showdown resumes in the new year. “This better not be the model of the approach,” said right-wing Republican Chip Roy, “or there will be, you know, trouble in so-called paradise.”

Paradise this conference is not. “It’s the same clown car with a different driver,” as Republican Representative Kelly Armstrong put it to Politico. “We essentially don’t have the majority.”

Part of the problem, as Politico notes, is the intra-conference division that drove—and was exacerbated by—the protracted speaker fight this fall. But the issue runs deeper than that: The mess in the House is what happens when a deeply unserious party, unfit to govern, is put in a position of governing. The same silliness runs through the Senate GOP, where Senator Markwayne Mullin challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fight during a hearing this week and where members like Ted Cruz essentially use their office to promote their media careers. And the idiocy has obviously been on display in the Republican presidential primary, whose frontrunner has taken to campaigning from the courtroom while his distant challengers trade futile barbs with one another in debates nobody is watching. But the power their majority affords them in the House puts an even brighter spotlight on their absurdity.

Johnson has tried to wave away the obvious dysfunction. “We’re not frustrated,” he told reporters as he adjourned the chamber for an early holiday. “I think we’ve had a great run.” But his own members don’t seem quite as willing to pretend the House GOP is one big, happy family. “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing—one—that I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy, the far-right Texan, said in a fiery floor speech Wednesday. “Explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”