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...if the United States would change to a true representative system. The House of Representatives isn't that at all. It's a silly regionalized system that can easily be manipulated by whatever party controls a particular state. Or, hell, by luck. What we really need for the House (the Senate can stay the way it is) is a national election, and each party would get a number of representatives proportional to the people voting for it. That way, people would feel like their votes actually matter -- and they would. If the Green Party got 1% of the votes (which is perfectly attainable for them), they'd get 4 or 5 representatives in Congress, who could do a lot of "damage," especially considering it's very possible that no party would ever get a majority of the votes and some sort of coalition would always be necessary to choose leaders or to get something passed.
Instead what we have are two parties that are basically extreme opposites, and people have to choose from the lesser of the two evils, rather than actually choosing a party that represents their beliefs, because that party (if it exists) has no chance of winning anything. A truly representative Congress would change that. It would also create some chaos, but our current government is pretty boring, so I say, why not?
Coincidentally, Iraq could benefit greatly from this type of government. Right now everybody over there is all freaked out about certain religious sects dominating the governing body because they dominate the population -- this pisses the minority religious people off, which may be fine and dandy in a "civilized" country like the US, but all that's going to lead to in Iraq is civil war the second we remove our troops. I think they could have not 2 but 3 houses in the Iraqi government: a regionalized house (similar to our House of Reps), a proportionalized house (similar to what I just said, with each party -- and by "party" in this case, I mean religious sects that organize parties -- getting proportional representation based on what happens in a general national election) and a Senate-like house in which each party gets the same number of representatives regardless of how large it is. Of course, there would have to be certain qualifications on what a "party" is for that to work, because a party with 15 people should not have veto power over a party with 5 million people. I say, any party that gets more than 5% or 10% of the vote gets to be part of this house. With this house, even if the Shiites can pass anything they want in the other 2 houses because they are the dominant population group, they can still get stopped by the Sunnis in the third house if the Sunnis believe this particular piece of legislation is really bad. This would lead to a lot more compromise just to make the government keep going.
Anyway, that's just my theory.
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