The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to remove Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-California) from his role as House speaker. It's the first time a speaker has ever been removed from the role. Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman discusses the historic move.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, as we just told you moments ago, ousted from his role.

The vote just wrapping up, and Yahoo Finance's senior columnist Rick Newman is here.

This seemed not necessarily likely or thinkable just a few days ago, Rick, and now it's happened here, 216 to 210.

Kevin McCarthy no longer speaker of the House.

RICK NEWMAN: Well, it's never happened before in US history.

I mean, we've never had a speaker removed, and let's remind everybody, removed by his own party or by a small sort of rump faction within his own party.

So the obvious question is, what happens next?

And this doesn't mean McCarthy is finished.

I mean, basically we start over in the bid to elect a House speaker, and the House is going to have to stay in session until they have a speaker.

So McCarthy can basically try again, which is what he did the first time around when I think we had 17 rounds of votes.

He couldn't get to the majority-vote threshold for several days, but he finally got there.

And so people might say, well, what would change between now and then?

Well, McCarthy has to find-- I think we-- I think there were eight Republicans, basically, who voted against him here, and that was enough because all Democrats also voted against him.

So McCarthy could just try to do some deal making with some of those eight holdouts, and I think he would need to convert either three or four of them.

So what could he give them in terms of projects for their districts or committee seats or something like that?

Another interesting possibility-- we just-- we briefly got to this earlier in the hour, but McCarthy or somebody could form an alliance with Democrats.

I mean, remember, Democrats have almost a majority in the House, and if you got most of the Democrats and some Republicans voting for a candidate, that person could become speaker.

Now, there would be, you know, more chaos in the Republican Party, I guess, but that's another way this could go.

And I'm sure there are some possibilities that the supercomputers haven't yet been able to figure out, but this is a weird and literally unprecedented situation.

So welcome to more chaos in Washington.

JULIE HYMAN: Fun stuff.

As, you know, Liz Ann Sonders said, you'd have to be living under a rock to think that this is new chaos.

There's just new flavors, I suppose, of the chaos, Rick.

And I'm seeing reports here that the interim speaker for right now is Patrick McHenry.

So he has recessed the House so both sides can figure out what the heck to do now.

When you talk about McCarthy potentially allying with Democrats as one of the possibilities here, I mean, he just has said in the past 24 hours that he would not do that, and that seems to have cost him-- at least one of the reasons it's cost him his speakership.

You know, his party is also trying to impeach the sitting president, so throw that into the mix as well here when you try and figure out, could there be some kind of alliance?

RICK NEWMAN: Right.

I mean, this is why I say it takes a supercomputer to figure out all the different directions this could go.

So let's say there were some kind of deal between McCarthy or somebody else, who would have to be a fairly moderate Republican, certainly not one of the bat-wing Republicans that have thrown this whole thing into chaos.

If they were to try to make a deal with Democrats, I mean, I think one of the first things Democrats would say is, well, one of our conditions is shut down the Biden impeachment inquiry.

They also want more-- they want to get through a bill that provides $24 billion, if not more, in aid for Ukraine, and I'm sure there's a long wish list of things that Democrats would say, well, here's what we want.

Now even moderate Republicans probably wouldn't go along with that, so I don't know how this is going to shake out, and all the political analysts I follow are all scratching their heads.

One thing I will say is guess who ends up looking pretty good in all of this?

President Biden and, in fact, Democrats themselves actually look pretty good.

You know, Democrats basically don't have this type of civil war happening that throws the whole Congress into an unworkable situation when they're in control, and President Biden-- the Biden White House keeps sending out what they call these split-screen analyses saying, well, here's what the clown Republicans are doing, and here's what President Biden is doing.

He's working to fix the border problem.

He's meeting with foreign leaders.

He's doing all this serious stuff, whereas these Republicans are just having a food fight among themselves.

So potential-- there's some potential traction for Biden and Democrats here with regard to the next election as long as they can sort of keep reminding voters of this.

And if Republicans keep doing this, keep shooting themselves in the foot, of course that's good for Democrats.

JOSH LIPTON: It is interesting.

Just on that point, Rick, while you were talking, I'm seeing this statement from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat from New York, and he put out a statement that he and other Democratic leaders would vote yes on Congressman Gaetz's motion to oust McCarthy.

He says here, "It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican civil war."

So I guess, Rick, that that speaks to your point here how Democrats feel when they sort of watch McCarthy and the GOP and House members kind of twisting in the wind here.

RICK NEWMAN: I mean, you know, simple rule of politics.

When your opponent is screwing up, get out of the way, and that's all Democrats have to do here.

You know, let's remind everybody, this deal to keep the government funded only lasts for-- was only for seven weeks, so we're going to get to the middle of November, and we're going to face a shutdown situation all over again, and we're going to have to figure out whether Congress can pass the normal bills that they, for the most part, have always passed that just keep the government working.

So we are going to have a speaker by then, but will this situation with basically, you know, 5 or 10 extreme Republicans holding the whole rest of the government hostage, are we going to be able to get past that or are we just going to have a replay of that in November?

I don't think anybody knows.

JULIE HYMAN: They don't know, and that uncertainty also seems to be weighing on stocks.

Even after the tough session that we had, it looks like futures are pushing lower, but we'll see how this all shakes out as we head through the morning and the next few weeks, the next couple months.

Figure out what's going to happen here, Rick.

Rick Newman, thank you so much for breaking all of that down for us.