If Yeltsin winning his office of the speaker (President of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) was a highly contested affair, then what he did next with his newly found power was surprisingly not.
Declaration of Sovereignty of the RSFSR was a very peculiar document. It did fell short of declaring the RSFSR independence from the USSR as such move would have divided RSFSR's parliament and would likely have been defeated. Instead, the declaration mostly talked about asserting their needs, status and importance of RSFSR inside the USSR.
However, it had an interesting clause that declared laws of the RSFSR to take precedence over those of the federal government of USSR. This clause suddenly turned Gorbachev from leader of the nuclear superpower into someone whose powers are as insignificant as those of General-Secretary of the UN or British Queen.
Normally in federal government, federal laws have precedence over the state ones. So, if for example a federal government in Washington DC will make abortions legal throughout the US, that federal law would invalidate any individual state laws that prohibit abortions. What Yeltsin did was turning that the other way around and instead gave RSFSR parliament power to invalidate laws of the USSR on territory of the RSFSR if they so wished.
In most federal states there would be a clause in constitution that would preclude states from doing something like that, however the USSR's constitution lacked such clause. The reason for such a gross oversight was the following: when last Soviet constitution was approved during late Brezhnev's time in 1978, USSR was still a stable one-party state. CPSU would carefully preselect candidates to all important positions based on their loyalty and obedience. Leadership could be sure none of them would try to vote on something the party would not approve.
Because of that confidence, they could frame Soviet Union as a voluntary association of fully independent nations, who are united by their fully free will with no coercion from the central government. Because of that Soviet constitution had clauses that allowed consistent republics freedom to secede from the union at any time as well as did not specify whether it is federal or republican laws that take precedence, should they be in conflict. After all, if all laws for all levels of government are first drafted in Polit Bureau, then they will never be in conflict with each other.
By the time Gorbachev became leader and decided on liberalization campaign, he and the rest of the party have long forgotten about these provisions that could have become loopholes for a cunning power grab.
While it is safe to assume that some of the RSFSR MPs did not have full understanding over the implications of the document they just voted in, that was not all there was.
Sovereignty Declaration was seen as best of both worlds: having benefits of being part of big union, but also freedom to do what they want and do not answer to any higher authority. Such a formula can win many supporters but also placate critics and cautions types by implying they will not lose anything. The deal was seen as so win-win that out of more than thousand strong parliament only 10 people abstained, and no one voted against it.
This formula soon became popular among the rest of the Soviet Republics and very soon Belarus, Ukraine and others begun adopting their own declarations of sovereignties. The whole process was dubbed Parade of sovereignties.
It took Gorbachev a while before he even noticed that. His first reaction was to pass a federal law that asserts that USSR is a federation, and federal laws take precedence over the republican ones.
However, Yeltsin took Gorbachev's new law to Constitutional Court and argued that it should be invalidated on the grounds of contradicting RSFSR Declaration of Sovereignty. Constitutional Court took Yeltsin's side in this one.
If Gorbachev was an American, he would have said that you can't just abolish they would superpower on legal technicality. However Constitutional Court insisted that Gorbachev knows nothing of law and letter of law to be upheld.
The rest of the 1990 Gorbachev and his crew spent studying constitutional law in order to find out if there is some other clause there that would allow them to claw their power back. Spoiler alert, they found one.
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