A majority of House lawmakers, including all Democrats and a handful of Republicans, backed a resolution by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to declare the speaker’s office vacant. The vote was 216 to 210.

The House will remain effectively leaderless until it elects a new speaker, though McCarthy can still win his job back.

With McCarthy’s ouster, the House enters uncharted territory. The mechanism used by Gaetz to engineer McCarthy’s fall has never successfully been used before, and has only been in existence since the early 1900s.

The House will have to hold another series of votes to determine a new speaker, and there is nothing to prevent McCarthy from running again if he wants to.

Tuesday’s vote followed a dramatic debate on the floor exclusively between a small group of hard-line House Republicans, led by Gaetz on the anti-McCarthy side and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) in favor of McCarthy.

Gaetz and his allies accused McCarthy of being untrustworthy and too willing to fold to Democrats when the pressure is on.

“Chaos is Speaker McCarthy,” Gaetz said.

Speaking from the Democratic side of the chamber floor, Gaetz gestured toward McCarthy’s supporters and the lawmakers around him, saying that what they all had in common was that McCarthy had told them things “he didn’t really mean and never intended to live up to.”

McCarthy did not make a speech defending his tenure, but he presented supporters from a broad ideological swath of his conference. “The overwhelming majority of my party supports the speaker we elected,” Cole said.

Democrats, who supported McCarthy’s ouster as a bloc, stayed silent through the debate, except to mockingly laugh when one of McCarthy’s supporters claimed he was one of the best speakers in House history.