In a historic vote, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position Tuesday by a small group of radical members of his own party led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

The Republican conference has been plagued with dysfunction for a while now — but the vote was a stunning display of just how broken and dysfunctional the system has become. In the past, other House speakers have been pushed out and Republican Speaker John Boehner retired while facing the threat of being ousted. But this is the first time a sitting speaker was removed by a vote. Gaetz exercised a little-known procedure that had not been used in more than 100 years to push a vote to vacate the speaker’s chair. When it was over, eight Republicans and every Democrat had voted to remove McCarthy.

Under procedures established after 9/11 to ensure the continuity of government, an acting speaker pro tempore was appointed from a list McCarthy had previously drawn up. Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a McCarthy ally who spoke fiercely in his defense during Tuesday’s debate, will fill the role until a new speaker is elected.

It is unclear when that vote might happen. At a closed-door meeting on Tuesday night, McCarthy told fellow Republicans that he will not run again. While the vote showed he had the support of the vast majority of the conference, it is difficult to see how he could have mounted a comeback. It took a tortuous 15 ballots for him to win the job back in January due to intervention by the same group of extreme Republicans who pushed for his ouster — and the party might be ready to move on anyway.

The last time there was an attempt to remove a speaker was in 1910, when Republicans tried to oust Joseph Cannon of Illinois. They were unsuccessful, but the intraparty fighting and divisions probably contributed to a Democratic takeover.

For all of the history-making impact and importance of Tuesday’s events, it is also true that the speaker fight is in many ways a sideshow, an even more dysfunctional attempt by a handful of Republicans to use a quirk in House rules to defy the overwhelming bulk of their conference who were satisfied with McCarthy’s leadership (or, are at least willing to vote to keep him as speaker). The real story is not about Gaetz and McCarthy, but about some 50 or more radical Republicans — "radical” because they simply do not believe in compromise and do not accept that this is needed to govern, even when their party holds only a slim majority in the House, and must deal with a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democrat in the White House.

And it is about the remainder of the House Republicans who haven’t figured out a way to deal with the radicals within their party. One of the concessions McCarthy made to these extremists to win the speakership also made it easier for them to call Tuesday’s vote.

Observers have been calling House Republicans dysfunctional since before McCarthy was elected to Congress in 2006. And the dysfunction is getting worse, regardless of how the speaker fight plays out. For example, while only a handful of Republicans joined Gaetz in trying to bring McCarthy down, 21 of them refused to vote for his ill-fated measure to keep the government running last week — and 90 voted against McCarthy’s last-minute successful attempt to avert a shutdown.

Perhaps symbolic of that dynamic is that while only eight Republicans ultimately voted against McCarthy, 11 voted against an earlier motion to kill Gaetz’s maneuver without a final vote. Normally, one would expect members to stick with their party on procedural votes. But not these Republicans.

Last week, Republicans managed to bring an agriculture spending bill to the House floor, but it failed badly. Even the spending bills that they have managed to pass are still dead on arrival in the Senate and no House Republicans have a plan for reaching a deal because so many of them are suspicious of just the idea of cutting deals.

We don’t know who might replace McCarthy. Nor do we know how long this particular fight will last. What we do know is that the larger dysfunction in the House Republican conference will continue.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote "A Plain Blog About Politics."