McCarthy had endured a nail-biting and perhaps humiliating 15-ballot struggle in order to win the chair earlier this year. In order to achieve that victory, however, he had had to grant some concessions to hard-line opponents. One of those concessions was the changing of House rules to allow just one Representative to bring a motion to remove the Speaker. One of those hard-line opponents was Florida's Matt Gaetz, who has spent the last few months remaining in opposition to McCarthy's leadership; it was Gaetz who brought the motion to vacate, in response, he said, to McCarthy's embracing a bipartisan bill to approve government funding necessary to keep the government in operation. And in a few hours of high drama, the House debated and then voted on the future of their Speaker.

The first occurrence was a motion to table, or set aside, the vote to vacate. That needed a simple majority of the members present and voting in order to pass; it did not, garnering 208 votes. The total tally was 416; the number of "No" votes was 218, meaning that the motion to table the vote to vacate failed, meaning that the House would then proceed to vote on the motion.

Such a move to oust a Speaker of the House has been done only twice in the long history of the House of Representatives. The most recent was in July 2015, when Republican Mark Meadows made such a motion that targeted then-Speaker John Boehner. The motion did not make it onto the House floor as a vote, but Boehner, already under fire, resigned two months later. The first such motion came in 1910, when the Speaker himself, Joseph Cannon, offered to oust himself if his Republican colleagues didn't fall in line. That motion did come to a vote and failed to get the necessary majority.

After the motion to table failed, a handful of Representatives then got up to speak. In a back-and-forth fashion, Gaetz and a few supporters had 30 minutes to press their case for ousting McCarthy and Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole and a few allies spoke for 30 minutes in favor of keeping McCarthy.

After all of that, it was down to the voting. As with the motion to table the resolution, the motion to remove the Speaker needed a simple majority of those present and voting in order to succeed. In the end, McCarthy's opponents garnered just enough support and were able to remove the California Representative from the chair. The total number of those voting was 426; the final tally was 216 "Yea" and 210 "Nay." In the end, 8 Republicans voted to remove their own Speaker. A total of 208 Democrats joined them. Gaetz had vowed to keep trying but succeeded the first time around.

Next up for the House is to name an acting Speaker. As part of his duties earlier this year, McCarthy prepared a list of names from which to choose a replacement should he or she be needed. The House will vote soon on naming an acting Speaker. But the House of Representatives needs a full-time Speaker, not least because the temporary measure that Congress agreed to in order to avoid a government shutdown expires on November 17.