Kyrsten Sinema’s done it again. The Arizona senator has a habit of forcing herself into the national spotlight, often for less than inspiring reasons, and her recent announcement that she’s officially leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent has predictably set the proverbial discourse alight.

Sinema’s announcement has, to a point, been a long time coming. The Arizona crony capitalist, after all, made her career by presenting herself as a sensible, middle-of-the-road voice, representing the proverbial forgotten moderate American sick of the partisan game-playing in Washington ― and spent the past two years reveling in frustrating her own party’s ambitions, seemingly aping the political strategy of her “personal hero” John McCain, whose Senate seat she currently sits in.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” Sinema wrote in the op-ed explaining the decision. The pressures of party politics, she explained, were empowering “the loudest, most extreme voices” of both, and made bipartisan compromise “a rarely acceptable last resort.”