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Adelita Grijalva made history last week, becoming the first Latina woman elected to represent Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. She won a special election for the seat previously occupied by her father, Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March after serving over two decades in office.
Despite a blowout, uncontested victory — and a precedent of swearing in the winners of special elections almost immediately after their elections — Grijalva still has no idea when she might become an official member of the House.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has yet to set a date for Grijalva’s swearing-in ceremony, and the delay is raising eyebrows. Grijalva has indicated she will sign a discharge petition that would force a floor vote to release government documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case as soon as she’s sworn in. Her signature would put the petition over the 218-vote threshold needed to override Republican leadership’s attempts to kill any vote to release the Epstein files.
To delay her swearing in would further delay the advancement of the petition, and give Republican leadership addition time to apply pressure to the Republican representatives — Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Co.), and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — who support it.
“I can’t see another reason,” Grijalva tells Rolling Stone. “It doesn’t change the majority; Democrats are still in the minority. That seems to be the only outstanding issue that I can see. It feels a little personal.”
In a statement to Rolling Stone, a spokesperson for Johnson’s office indicated that “as is standard practice, with the House now having received the appropriate paperwork from the state, the speaker’s office intends to schedule a swearing in for the Representative-elect when the House returns to session.”
The House’s return to session was delayed by Johnson last week, pushing it to Oct. 7, over two weeks after Grijalva won her election. Precedent establishes that in an uncontested election, there is no procedural rule barring a representative-elect from being sworn in during a pro-forma session. In April, Reps. Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine — both Republicans representing Florida — were sworn in by Johnson during a pro-forma session the day after their special elections. In September, Johnson swore in Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) less than 24 hours after Walkinshaw won his special election.
“For me, apparently there are new requirements,” Grijalva says. “It’s very frustrating on my end. We’re starting up a new office, trying to hire staff, get all set up. Our community has not had a representative be able to vote for them for a very long time.”
The representative-elect added that she and her team had not heard directly from Johnson’s office. “We haven’t heard anything from the speaker’s office,” she says. “I’ve heard different scenarios. And unfortunately, we first started hearing about any issue through the press, reporters would say, ‘I reached out to the speaker’s office, and this is what I heard back.’ So a lot of this is second- and third-hand information.”
House Democrats have also begun to raise objections to the stalling. In a Monday letter to Johnson, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Conn.) wrote that “any delay in swearing in Representative-elect Grijalva unnecessarily deprives her constituents of representation and calls into question if the motive behind the delay is to further avoid the release of the Epstein files.”
Clark called on Johnson to reverse his decision to cancel this week’s votes, and to immediately swear in Grijalva.
Despite not having a swearing-in ceremony in the books, Grijalva has traveled to Washington, D.C., and is working out of borrowed conference rooms in other members’ offices. “I’m hearing from my constituents, ‘When are you able to work? We elected you by nearly 40 points. There’s no dispute on who won the election, so why can’t you get to work?’” she adds. “I have three kids, a husband, a mom who would all like to be a part of this, so the back and forth and being unsure is really problematic.”
Grijalva’s new constituents appear to be voiceless — at least until she’s sworn in — because of the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the Epstein case, and their continued efforts to kill any efforts toward transparency. Republican leadership has obliged the administration’s efforts to kill the story. Over the summer, Johnson began the House’s August recess early in order to prevent votes on the release of the files from advancing. Earlier this month, Johnson publicly suggested that Trump may have only maintained a relationship with Epstein because he was secretly an FBI informant (Johnson later tried to walk back the claim).
Not everyone in the party is on board. Rep. Massie, in particular, has long been calling for transparency, and over the weekend, Rep. Greene, a longtime Trump loyalist, told The New York Times that she does not “work” for the White House and will not bow to their pressure campaigns to sway her.
On Sunday, Greene wrote on X that she was “not suicidal and one of the happiest healthiest people you will meet. … With that said, if something happens to me, I ask you all to find out which foreign government or powerful people would take heinous actions to stop the information from coming out,” suggesting a conspiracy to keep the Epstein files hidden from the public.
Johnson’s office has tried to avoid linking the delay surrounding Grijalva to the Epstein discharge petition, but it’s clear to all that her first act as a sitting member of the House would reignite a firestorm that Republican leadership has been trying to tamp down for months.
