Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn into Congress on Wednesday, more than seven weeks after she won a special election for the Tucson-area House seat, ending a tumultuous and partisan tug-of-war to get her seated.
Grijalva won the seat in a Sept. 23 special election, but Speaker Mike Johnson had kept the House in recess, citing the government shutdown, and ignored demands from Democrats to seat her during pro forma sessions. The 7th District seat has been vacant since March, when Grijalva’ father, the late Arizona Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, died.
She plans to confront Johnson over the delay, she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview Tuesday: “I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to say, I’m going to be as respectful as possible … This kind of obstruction cannot happen again.”
“I won’t be able to, like, sort of move on if I don’t address it personally,” she said.
Grijalva is expected to cast her first vote in opposition to the Senate-passed funding measure that paved the way for an end to the longest partial shutdown in history. The bill would fund the government through Jan. 30 and provide full-year appropriations for the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, along with legislative operations.
She is also expected to be the key signature on a discharge petition aimed at compelling the release of material related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender.
Throughout the shutdown, Democrats hammered at GOP leaders for delaying her oath of office. Grijalva herself spent much of her time speaking to the media about her odd predicament. She made countless media appearances, both in Washington and in her hometown of Tucson, Ariz.
She also took steps to circumvent Johnson, but those efforts never came to fruition. A month after her election, she asked a federal court to allow someone else to administer her oath to be the state’s 7th District representative since Johnson had delayed allowing her to take office. And she appeared on fundraising messaging from Democrats across the country to make her argument.
“Republicans know that once I’m sworn in, it won’t just chip away at their razor-thin majority — I will become the decisive 218th signature to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files,” Grijalva said in a Nov. 9 fundraising message sent through Rep. Josh Harder, D-Calif. “This is nothing more than a desperate power play to protect Trump while denying the people of my district a voice in Congress when it’s needed the most.”
Grijalva grew up around politics. Her father first entered public office when she was a child. She recalled how he would often take the time to speak with members of the public, with her and her sisters serving as intermediaries.
“We were, like, staffing him all the time: ‘Yeah, that guy wants to take a picture,’ [or] ‘that lady wants to talk to you,’” she said.
Like her father, Grijalva is an unapologetic progressive. She has harshly criticized the policies of President Donald Trump, including the economic impacts of tariffs on local businesses and the cost of living in her district, which stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border and extends into Tucson and the Phoenix area.
Her own political path closely resembled that of her father’s: Before Congress, both served on the local Tucson school board, and both were elected as Pima County supervisors.
But she admitted that her timeline didn’t always suit the elder Grijalva: “My dad wanted me to run for office when I was 18. I’m like, ‘I’m going to college.’”
Now Grijalva is eager to embrace her father’s legacy and has her eye on his committee assignments: Natural Resources and Education and the Workforce. And she is already talking about making some of his policy proposals her own, including a sweeping bill to classify some environmental regulations as civil rights concerns under the law.
“That was something my father spent an incredible amount of time on and worked very hard on,” Grijalva said.
Nick Eskow, Niels Lesniewski, Justin Papp and Michael Macagnone contributed to this report.
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