WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- The United States is embarrassed by a prolonged House speakership election that has paralyzed the new Congress with scars left by the Capitol riot stinging even more on the second anniversary.
The historic deadlock in the House coincided with the two-year mark of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when a large group of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol -- located at the eastern end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -- and disrupted a joint session of Congress to affirm the results of the 2020 presidential election in which Biden won.
Republicans flipped the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections -- the most expensive of those in history -- while Democrats held onto their majority in the Senate. The divided 118th Congress convened for the first time on Tuesday, but the lower chamber ran into a stalemate unseen in a century.
U.S. Congressman Kevin McCarthy from California -- who served as House Republican leader over the past four years -- failed to be elected the new speaker in three days of voting due to intra-party division.
A House special committee led by Democrats launched an 18-month investigation into the Jan. 6 attack and issued a "final report" last month, alleging and detailing a "multistep effort" devised and driven by Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.
The panel, poised to be dissolved by House Republicans, accused Trump of inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement, and obstruction of an official proceeding, and made criminal referrals to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the Jan. 6 committee and described the investigation and other inquiries related to him as politically motivated.
Such chaos in U.S. politics has exposed a series of entrenched defects of the U.S. democratic system, making it difficult to break the country's political deadlock for a while, said Chen Wenxin, executive director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.
Political risk consultancy Eurasia Group listed "Divided States of America" as one of the top risks for 2023 in a recent report, saying the United States "remains one of the most politically polarized and dysfunctional of the world's advanced industrial democracies."
"The growing partisan polarization of the American electorate is continuing to erode the legitimacy of core federal institutions: the three branches of government and the peaceful transfer of power through free and fair elections," the report cautioned.
Amid endless partisan fighting, outstanding issues that concern the well-being of the American people, such as gun violence, abortion rights and inflation, remain unsettled.
