Just imagine the kind of damage the Gingrich revolution or the Tea Party could do if the political agenda was determined by them in the House, and the only thing stopping them was Harry Reid and a handful of Blue Dog Democrats.
I don't think that's such a bad thing. Someone like Gingrich may not have come to power if the US were under a parliamentary system. If he did, he would have ultimately been held accountable for his actions. It's one thing to hold a position, but it's quite another to actually enact it.
Are you sure? If it was Prime Minister Reagan he probably could have held power till the day he died, with no term limits and only popular support from the caucus required to stay in power. Even if they were to lose the next election, they have that power in the mean time to push their agenda. Our Prime Minister right now is slashing education funding, pawning off public assets, dismantling environmental protection laws, dismantling hate crime laws, reinstating knights and dames, violating Indonesian sovereignty, etc. etc. At least with your Republican House you have Obama's veto.Reagan probably wouldn't have been "Reagan" under a parliamentary system. If the US had the Australian constitutional system, then, for example, a Democratic parliamentary majority probably would have enacted universal health insurance in the 1960s or 70s, and we'd still have it today.
What I'm getting at is that since the Democrats are the party that's more interested in activist government on economic issues, their agenda suffers more in a system in which there are many veto points. The American constitutional order is "conservative" in the sense that it tends to conserve the status quo. Big social programs are hard to pass. So if the USA had a parliamentary system, then I imagine that the political spectrum would be shifted a bit to the left of where it is now, at least on economic issues.
Of course, there are all sorts of other confounding issues, like the fact that individual members of Congress act as free agents in a way that doesn't happen in most parliamentary systems, where things are run in a much more top down manner. Legislative power is incredibly diffuse in the US.
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