[Old Grump]

Originally Posted by polishshooter

Old Grump, you made my POINT!!

How many of them were SUCCESSFUL parties and actually got a President or Control of CONGRESS ELECTED, and HOW did they do it????

ONLY the Federalists and Anti-Federalists...at first...

Then the Democrat-Republican which became the Democrat party replaced the Anti-Federalists when they imploded....


THEN the Whigs who replaced the Federalists when THEY imploded....


Then the Republicans who replaced the Whigs when THEY imploded.


Since then, ???????

EVERY OTHER PARTY YOU list (so far,) is a FOOTNOTE you looked up on the internet. Before the internet you wouldn't even HAVE the list because they made so little impact on our politics OR History....probably you would have only heard of the Bull Moose party, who caused a highly POPULAR Former President to lose in a LANDSLIDE...


One of the MAJOR parties IMPLODED. And "a" "minor" one in the right place at the right time with the right message REPLACED it.

We will never be an Italy or UK, they are different forms of government. UK is a parliamentarian form of government and Italy is a Republic but it only has 15 regions to contend with not 50 states and its constitution has been amended more times than you can shake a stick at it and it was only ratified in 1948 so lets stay with apples and not bring the pears and oranges into the discussion.

The reason we are stuck in a 2 party system is because they were successful in side stepping some constitutional issues, they got to big and powerful and the working stiff was to busy rebuilding our country and putting our lives back in order after the civil war, the war to end all wars, WWII, the undeclared Korean War which is a prime example of our Republic gone wrong. There should never be an undeclared war. I fought in one in Viet Nam and I'm still mad that we didn't have a declaration of war, that the country didn't back us and the politicians snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

We have imploded and both parties need to be reformed radically but they won't do it without a huge outside push. 10% to 15% would shake their tree so bad but we have all the inertia guys saying we can't win with a third party so lets not try. Even 5% or 6% of the popular vote would change the decision making in congress.

We don't need to win, we just need enough votes to prevent a super majority of either major party and force them to deal with a third party in order to function. This will not happen until they clean up their act. That is what a third party is good for. So go Boo Hoo all you want, it doesn't matter what goombah sits in the oval office if we don't straighten out congress.

Your insistence that we all vote Republican all the way only encourages the Old Guard to continue as they were. Push the current resident out and replace him with another liberal and congress just keeps on doing what they have done for the last 150 years. Faces change but we still have the same problems we have had inside the beltway. It isn't the Supreme Courts job to fix the problem, it is ours.