Speaker Johnson withholds swearing-in of Rep.-elect Grijalva, conditioning seating on unrelated shutdown vote

House Speaker Mike Johnson withheld the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva after she won Arizona's 7th Congressional District special election in late September 2025 to fill the seat vacated by the death of her father, Rep. Raúl Grijalva. Johnson conditioned her seating on Senate Democrats agreeing to reopen the federal government, which had been shut down amid budget negotiations — an unrelated political demand that had no basis in the ministerial duty to seat a duly elected member of Congress.

The refusal to seat Grijalva left 813,000 constituents in Arizona's 7th District without representation in Congress during the shutdown. On October 21, 2025, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and Grijalva filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., demanding Johnson immediately fulfill his duty to swear her in. The lawsuit argued that the Speaker's authority over swearing-in ceremonies is ministerial in character — it does not permit conditioning on political demands unrelated to the member's election.

Reporting noted that Grijalva's presence in the House would provide the 218th vote needed for a discharge petition that Democrats were pursuing to release the Epstein files, a factor Johnson's critics cited as an additional motive for the delay. Johnson did not publicly explain his reasons beyond framing the seating as connected to shutdown negotiations. The lawsuit was one of several legal challenges to Johnson's refusal filed in October 2025.