WASHINGTON — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Tuesday filed a lawsuit to try to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who won her late father’s seat in a special election nearly one month ago.
Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has said he will seat Grijalva once Senate Democrats agree to reopen the government. But the two parties haven’t been talking for weeks, and there is no indication when the shutdown might end.
The lawsuit, which Mayes threatened in a letter to Johnson last week, argues that the speaker’s delay is depriving the 813,000 residents living in Arizona’s 7th District of congressional representation. It lists the state of Arizona and Grijalva herself as plaintiffs and the U.S. House, as well as the House clerk and sergeant at arms, as defendants.
“Speaker Mike Johnson is actively stripping the people of Arizona of one of their seats in Congress and disenfranchising the voters of Arizona’s seventh Congressional district in the process,” Mayes said in a statement. “By blocking Adelita Grijalva from taking her rightful oath of office, he is subjecting Arizona’s seventh Congressional district to taxation without representation. I will not allow Arizonans to be silenced or treated as second-class citizens in their own democracy.”
As he left the Capitol Tuesday evening, Johnson blasted the Arizona lawsuit as “patently absurd.”
Mayes, he said, has “no jurisdiction.”
Grijalva and congressional Democrats have been holding news conferences on Capitol Hill, doing TV interviews and staging protests outside Johnson’s office to try to pressure the speaker to relent. But Mayes’ move escalates the standoff and gets the courts involved.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other Democrats have argued that Johnson is delaying seating Grijalva because she represents the 218th — and final — signature on a discharge petition needed to force a House vote to compel the Justice Department to release all of its files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
Johnson has repeatedly denied that the delay has anything to do with the Epstein files. The speaker has said he is happy to swear in Grijalva as soon as the government, now on the 21st day of the shutdown, reopens.
And Johnson accused Mayes, a Democrat who is running for re-election in 2026, of seeking publicity following a public clash he had with Arizona’s two Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, over the Grijalva issue earlier this month.
“So, yet another Democrat politician from Arizona is trying to get national publicity. So now it’s the state AG, who’s going to sue me because … Rep.-elect Grijalva is not yet sworn in,” Johnson told reporters Monday.
He said he is following what he called the “Pelosi precedent,” noting that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., took 25 days to administer the oath of office to then-Rep.-elect Julia Letlow, R-La. Letlow won a 2021 special election to fill the seat of her husband, who died of Covid complications days before he was set to be sworn into office. The House was out on recess following her election, amid the pandemic, and she was sworn in the week that it returned to session.
“So I will administer the oath to [Grijalva], I hope, on the first day we come back to legislative session. I’m willing and anxious to do that,” Johnson told reporters in the Capitol.
Grijalva handily won her special election on Sept. 23, 28 days ago, and just four days after the House voted to pass its short-term government funding bill and left town.
Johnson continued: “In the meantime, instead of doing TikTok videos, she should be serving her constituents. She could be taking their calls. She could be directing them, trying to help them through the crisis that the Democrats have created by shutting down the government.”
Grijalva is the daughter of former Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a progressive power broker and former Natural Resources Committee chairman who died in March after serving more than two decades in the House.
“There is so much that cannot be done until I am sworn in,” Grijalva said Tuesday at a news conference with Jeffries. “While we’re getting a lot of attention for not being sworn in, I’d rather get the attention for doing my job.”
Once she is sworn in, Grijalva is expected to quickly sign the bipartisan discharge petition — led by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif. — which would allow them to bypass Johnson’s leadership team and force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
For months, the Epstein issue has been a nagging headache for both Johnson and President Donald Trump. Many of the president’s MAGA supporters have called for transparency and the release of all of the documents related to the case. On Tuesday, Johnson pointed out that the House Oversight Committee is investigating the matter and has released more than 43,000 pages of documents from DOJ and the Epstein estate.
“The bipartisan House Oversight Committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought — and much more,” Johnson, standing alongside Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said Tuesday.
In an interview in the Capitol, Khanna said Johnson should just swear Grijalva in and hold the vote on the Epstein files because the issue is not going away.
“They gotta swear in Adelita Grijalva. I don’t know why they’re delaying the inevitable. They’re kind of hoping this story dies and they get it out of the front pages, but then it comes roaring back once we get the votes,” Khanna told NBC News. “I wish we could just swear Adelita Grijalva in and have a vote on the release of the Epstein files.”
Democrats are expected to win another vacant House seat in the coming weeks. On Nov. 4, voters will choose someone to fill the vacancy left by the unexpected death in March of Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Texas, who represented a heavily Democratic district.
If Democrats prevail in that special election, it would trim the GOP majority in the House to 219-215 and mean Johnson could only lose a single GOP defection on any vote.
