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Johnson sets record refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva for 36 days after she won election [1]

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Date: 2025-10 

U.S. Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva unwillingly set a record on Wednesday with her 36-day wait to be sworn in to represent the state’s 7th Congressional District.

The Tucson Democrat easily won a Sept. 23 special election in the deep blue southern Arizona district formerly represented by her father Raúl Grijalva, who died of cancer in March.

But Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has refused to swear in Grijalva, using a range of excuses, the most frequent of which is the federal government shutdown, which began Oct. 1.

Johnson initially promised to seat Grijalva whenever she requested it, but then backtracked and said he’d only do so after Democrats in the U.S. Senate agreed to support a stopgap spending bill to reopen the government.

Republicans and Democrats have been playing the blame game for weeks now over who is responsible for the shutdown, with Republicans falsely claiming that Democrats refused to vote for a stopgap funding bill as a way to protect health care services for immigrants who lack legal status.

“Speaker Johnson may be blocking my swearing-in, but he can’t stop me from showing up for the people of Southern Arizona,” Grijalva said in a statement on Wednesday. “Every day that goes by without representation is another day our veterans, seniors, and working families are left without a voice in Congress.”

Because Johnson has refused to seat Grijalva, she now holds the record for the longest delay in seating a member of Congress following a special election, a distinction previously held by Rep. Jimmy Gomez, of California. But there’s a huge difference: Gomez requested the delay due to family issues, while Grijalva and other Democrats have repeatedly demanded that Johnson swear in Grijalva.

Last week, Grijalva and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued Johnson for the delay, arguing that his stall-tactics have denied the more than 800,000 Arizonans in the 7th Congressional District their constitutional right to representation. Johnson’s obligation to deliver the oath of office to elected members of Congress is not discretionary, they said in the lawsuit.

Grijalva, along with other Democrats, claim that Johnson is blocking her from taking office because she would be the 218th vote needed to force the release of the FBI’s case files concerning pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Republicans have largely opposed doing so because President Donald Trump is reportedly featured in those files, as he and Epstein were close friends in the 1990s before they had a falling out.

Johnson has denied those allegations.

In their lawsuit, Grijalva and Mayes also accused Johnson of using her swearing-in as a bargaining chip to force Democrats in the Senate to vote for Republicans’ stopgap funding bill to reopen the government.

While Johnson has said he’ll swear her in once the government reopens, he has the power to give her the oath now, and has sworn in multiple representatives during his tenure less than 24 hours after they won a special election — even when the House of Representatives was not in session.

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[1] Url: https://azmirror.com/briefs/johnson-sets-record-refusing-to-swear-in-adelita-grijalva-for-36-days-after-she-won-election/

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