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Starting a new job can be hard. And stressful. You want to hit the ground running. You want to make a good first impression. You want to reassure the people who hired you that they made the right decision.
At this point, Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic representative-elect from Arizona, is just grateful to have a key to her office — even if it took a few weeks and a lot of complaining to get it. What would be even better now would be if she could get an operating budget to pay for things like office supplies and travel. She would also like access to the House’s secure databases. And she’d love one of those lapel pins that help members move freely about the Capitol. Because of ID delays, she so far hasn’t even been able to “get into the building after hours,” she told me in a phone interview from her home in Tucson last week.
These all seem like modest asks for a member of Congress. Ms. Grijalva won a special election over a month ago to succeed her father, Raúl Grijalva, who died in March. The outcome was not close — she pulled nearly 70 percent of the vote. Yet she remains unable to fully serve her district, because the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, refuses to swear her in.
To be clear, Ms. Grijalva has asked to be sworn in. Repeatedly. She has, in fact, become a burr in Mr. Johnson’s bum. She has written him a letter and left him messages requesting a meeting. She has gone on the political talk shows to plead her case. She has posted a series of cheeky social media videos. In one, she takes viewers on a tour of her Washington office, detailing some of the many tasks she could not yet do. She has asked voters to sign a petition and to phone the speaker’s office protesting the delay.
“It’s mostly just letting people know exactly what is going on,” said Ms. Grijalva. Her district currently does not have a functioning representative, she observed. “That’s just not OK.”
So what’s the holdup? Tough to say, exactly. Mr. Johnson has not met with or even spoken to Ms. Grijalva about the situation. His office pointed me toward his existing statements, but these justifications for foot-dragging have been a little hard to follow, much less swallow.
The speaker has blamed the government shutdown, which officially began Oct. 1., although he sent the House home early on Sept. 19. He says he is simply following the precedent of swearing in members only when the chamber is in regular session. He has even taken to calling this “the Pelosi precedent,” referring to an episode in 2021 when Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker, waited nearly a month to swear in a Republican member who had won a special election that March.
Not to nitpick, but this argument would sound more convincing if not for the fact that, when two Republicans won special elections in Florida in April, Mr. Johnson leaped to seat them within 24 hours even though the House wasn’t in regular session. He used a “pro forma” session to get the job done.
Pressed on the discrepancy, Mr. Johnson has offered a convoluted explanation involving a preset swearing-in date, the Republicans’ families having traveled to Washington, the relative timing of the elections and so on. Simply trying to follow his logic leaves you needing a chiropractor.
Bolder still, Mr. Johnson has taken to publicly scolding Ms. Grijalva to stick to doing her job and stop wasting time … um … spotlighting his refusal to let her officially start that job.
It bears repeating that Mr. Johnson is jerking around not just Ms. Grijalva but the 813,000 people of Arizona’s Seventh District, which runs along the state’s southern border. For instance, until Ms. Grijalva is a full-fledged member, her office cannot collect and track a lot of the sensitive information needed to do casework for constituents.
But perhaps the speaker thinks he doesn’t owe the people of Ms. Grijalva’s district anything since they overwhelmingly rejected his party’s House pick. Such is the essence of Trumpist leadership: If you don’t support my tribe, you deserve to be ignored, even punished. To have your government funding frozen. To have federal troops swarm your cities. To have your duly elected representative delayed from getting down to work for you. Then maybe next time you’ll know better.
Ms. Grijalva said she is feeling “burned” by the situation. “Everything Speaker Johnson has said in like the last two weeks is just very patronizing and misogynistic,” she said. “That was not the impression I had of him. But I see it in his face now every time someone asks about my swearing in: The head starts shaking, and the eyes start blinking.” And all she can think, said Ms. Grijalva, is, “You did this! No one would have known who I was if you would have just sworn me in in a pro forma session.”
A more conspiracy-minded person might suspect that Mr. Johnson had a more pointed reason for taking things slow. Once seated, Ms. Grijalva will provide the 218th and deciding signature on a discharge petition needed to force a House vote on whether to demand the release of government files on Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker Mr. Trump used to pal around with. The president, who denies all knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s crimes, clearly doesn’t want those files released. Who is Mr. Johnson to ruffle the boss’s feathers?
Whatever the speaker’s reasons, the conflict continues to fester. Last Tuesday the Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, joined Ms. Grijalva in filing a lawsuit against the House. The speaker promptly dismissed the move as an “absurd” play for publicity by Ms. Mayes. “Good luck with that,” he said.
Presumably, Mr. Johnson eventually will run out of excuses, and Ms. Grijalva will get to really dig into her new gig — even if a bit bruised and disillusioned by the dysfunctional state of her workplace.
Until then, she has every intention of staying in the speaker’s face. This is about “keeping very visible and letting people know that I’m not going to take this sitting down, because this community doesn’t do that,” she told me. And the first thing she plans to do once she’s sworn in? “I’m going to sign that discharge petition.”
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
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Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
