as their new party's whip. The chairman of the political party can choose to replace the party switcher with whomever they choose. Party merging, however, is not illegal and can be seen when a big amount of political parties merged into United Russia, the current ruling party of Russia. Turkey Party switching is not unusual in Turkey, but Kubilay Uygun is known for his repeated switching during his single term in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (1995 – 1999). He resigned from his party seven times and served four different parties, finishing as an independent. Ukraine In Ukraine, the imperative mandate provision of the Ukrainian Constitution banned party switching in Parliament from 2004 to 2010. The mandate stipulated that the constitution and laws of Ukraine obliged members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's Parliament, to remain members of the parliamentary faction or bloc in which they were elected. This was evident during the 2007 Ukrainian political crisis where members of the opposition crossed party lines with plans to undermine Presidential authority and move towards the 300 constitutional majority. On 21 February 2014 the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that reinstated the 2004 imperative mandate. In practice the imperative mandate causes the deprivation of the mandate of deputies who leave their faction by their own initiative while deputies who are removed from their faction become an independent MP. United States Party-switching in the United States Congress (for example, from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, or vice versa) is relatively rare. During the period between 1947 and 1997, only 20 members of the House of Representatives and Senate switched parties. Periods with a high degree of party switching (among both elected officials and citizens) are linked to periods of partisan realignment. After the 1994 elections (in which Republicans gained control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in four decades), five House Democrats and two Senate Democrats switched to the Republican Party. Another notable switch took place in 2001 when Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party to become a political independent, which placed the Senate in Democratic control. Another notable example is when in April 2009, Arlen Specter, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, switched to the Democratic Party. This provided Democrats a 3/5 majority in the Senate, which helped enable the Affordable Care Act to pass the Senate. See also Crossing the floor, which in