Let’s just imagine that we have – right now – a US House of Representatives populated by members from, say, four effective parties, an effective party being defined loosely as having at least several percent of the total number of members of the House, enough to have bargaining power. The increase in the number of parties evolved fairly rapidly after changes were made in electoral methods just a very few years ago.
Each party has a somewhat narrower, but better articulated and reasoned set of values and interests than we had experienced in old days of only two parties. We voters know more accurately where each member stands.
The members were elected not from single-member (read Safe) districts, but from Multi-Member districts. This coupled with using a proportional voting methodology called Ranked Choice Voting produced elected members with a wider and better understood range of viewpoints. It also produced a set of members with values much more proportional to those of the voters.
Electing senators was quite different, but changes occurred there also. Using proportional voting methodologies and changes in or elimination of the primaries had good effects. But, mostly the evolution into four parties spilled over into the senate races, causing the election of people with a greater variety of values.
What changes have we noticed?
Well, the first and most obvious were the elections of the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. After all, each is supposed to be the leader of all the House or Senate!
Committees are fully operating now, the way they did decades ago, and their chairs no longer all come from one party. Other aspects of regular order and floor discussion of bills is in full bloom. Everyone is ecstatic about what happened.
Then followed the discussion on raising the debt limit. The smaller parties carried the day by insisting on ending the past gridlocks and starting with a clean sheet of paper, and they would not move on until something permanent was done.
The immigration debate is still going on, but it appears that coalitions are being formed that will enact changes to immigration law in chunks rather than in a 5,280 page bill.
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