Stephen Colbert's sister will run for Congress

Stephen Colbert often toys with entering national politics. He filed to run for president and he started a super PAC, but it's his sister who might actually make it to Washington as an elected official.

Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, Colbert's older sister, told the Democratic Party she will file papers to run for the open congressional seat in South Carolina's 1st Congressional district, CBSNews.com has confirmed.

Running as a Democrat, she might have a difficult time winning the conservative district, but it will be a heavily watched race in an off-year election. If she in fact files the papers and wins a possible primary, she could face the likely Republican nominee, former Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., who was censured by the state legislature after his infamous affair with an Argentine woman. Sanford previously represented the district in the U.S. House from 1995-2001.

The primaries are set for March 19 with runoffs - if a candidate doesn't receive a majority - on April 2; the general election is May 7.

The seat was vacated by former Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who was appointed by Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., to the Senate. Scott replaced former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who retired from the Senate on December 31 to run a conservative Washington think tank.

Colbert-Busch works at Clemson University where she is the director of business development for their wind turbine test facility.

As The Washington Post pointed out, the Charleston Post and Courier profiled Colbert-Bush in 2010, and reported that she experienced several difficult circumstances: "Her father and two of her brothers were killed in a plane crash when she was 19. She was married to a man who ended up on "America's Most Wanted." And in 2001, while at a business conference in New York City, she was sitting in a building directly across the street from the World Trade Center when two jetliners slammed into its twin towers, forever changing the landscape of America."