-- A rather pointed statement on SCOTUS vacancy from Senator Warren --

[tblue37]

41. That Democrat was actually a Republican who had been recruited to switch parties

to run as Sebelius's lieutenant governor after her first lt. gov. (who also switched from R to D in order to run with her for her first term!) decided not to run again.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Parkinson_(Kansas_politician)

In May 2006, Governor Kathleen Sebelius announced that Parkinson had switched parties and was her running mate for her reelection campaign, succeeding retiring lieutenant governor John E. Moore (also a former Republican who had switched parties shortly before he joined a ticket with Sebelius).[1] Parkinson's business experience and track record of working with both Republicans and Democrats were the reasons Sebelius gave for choosing him.

The Kansas Republican Party immediately labeled Parkinson a hypocrite, citing 2002 quotes where Parkinson called Sebelius a "left-wing liberal Democrat" and claimed that any Republicans who supported her were "either insincere or uninformed."[1] Parkinson responded to the criticism by saying he had doubted Sebelius four years earlier, but came to believe she provided "independent leadership" for the state. He stated: "In an age where leaders duck responsibility and dodge their mistakes let me be the first to say: I was wrong."[1] Some viewed his switch as opportunism; others felt his decision was another example of the bitter divide between moderates and conservatives in the Kansas Republican Party, and that the move encouraged more moderate Republican voters to move closer to the Democratic Party.

Kansas was a 3-party state--rather conservative Dems, somewhat moderate Republicans, and batguano insane RW Republicans. But the super RW Republicans primaried the moderate Rs out of the legislature, which is how Brownback got his rubberstamp legislature for his Koch backed agenda. The miderate Rs and the Dems used to work together in the legislature to prevent the extreme RWers from oing too much damage, but the RWers finally took over--probably with a fair amount of vote rigging, as the anomalous vote math from the last election has strongly suggested.