What would you think of having a parliament instead of the House?

It's a good question, but you're getting a little confusing government systems with electoral systems.

A parliament is a legislature where some of the legislators also form the executive branch of the government. In a parliament, a few members of parliament (the leadership of the governing party or coalition) become the prime minister and cabinet ministers. They remain legislators, and still vote on bills, but they also oversee the agencies of the government bureaucracy, and are responsible for translating law into national policy. If we switched to a parliamentary system, we would not only change the structure of the lower house of the legislature, but abolish the presidency and the Cabinet as it currently exists, and replace it with a prime minister, a cabinet of MPs, and a president who would have no day-to-day political power.

What you're talking about is a proportional representation system, which is an electoral system. In a PR system, seats are allocated to larger regions than single-member districts. Each multi-member district (MMD) gets a number of seats, and seats are awarded based on party vote, and you vote for a slate of candidates. So, if a MMD has 20 seats, and the Democrats win 55% of the vote, the Republicans get 40%, and the Greens get 5%, then the Dems would get 11 seats, the GOP 8, and the Greens would get 1 seat.

Not all parliamentary democracies use PR. The United Kingdom, for example, has single-member districts like the USA, where each district gets one seat, and whoever has the most votes wins the seat. In the UK, party discipline is higher -- the parties control who get on the ballot, etc., which is a common trait in parliamentary systems, but the USA electoral system resembles that of the UK in many respects.

So, we could adopt PR for distributing House seats, and it would probably allow multiple parties to flourish, rather than a fixed two-party system, but that wouldn't make us parliamentary. It would just be a change of electoral systems. Overall, I think the idea is sound, and overdue. There are too many wasted votes in our system.

Our system was modeled on Fredrick the Great's. It is useful when you want sure that a candidate from one state or a minority party couldn't sweep the election without general popular support from several regions. But it's not likely that we are going to change it now.

Not a hope in hell. The parties are the problem and the people's house is closest to being representative.

I'd be happy to replace the Senate with another House, at the moment, though. Doubtless someone will remind me why we shouldn't.