The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is surely historic, deserving of both the obsessive media attention and the doleful warnings it has spawned.

Shocking as this week’s vote was, we should have been better prepared for it.

It is true that no previous speaker had been ousted by a vote of the whole House in the whole history of the United States. But it should not have been a surprise. We might have seen it coming, short term and long.

In the immediate timeframe, it has been widely noted that the rules change made in January that allowed just one House member to force a vote on removing the speaker had meant McCarthy’s days were numbered.

A single rank-and-file member can challenge the House’s presiding member, who holds an office created by the First Article of the Constitution. In an era of narrow partisan majorities, that rule makes a speaker’s removal a daily prospect – and perhaps an inevitability.

But taking a broader view, the status of the speakership has been declining for years – arguably for decades. McCarthy’s ouster is the most extreme example, but it is also just the latest in a sequence of events that have increased the vulnerability of the office and thus made the speaker weaker.