House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will swear in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on Wednesday after a seven-week delay.
Grijalva won a special election called after the death of her father and predecessor, Rep. Raúl Grijalva. She then broke the record for the longest delay faced by a representative between winning an election and being sworn in, a delay widely decried by Democrats as politically motivated. On Tuesday, Johnson’s office issued a notice that Grijalva would be sworn in at 4 p.m. on Wednesday.
Grijalva welcomed the development, but added a note of bitterness over the fact that her first vote would be on the Senate’s bill to end the government shutdown.
“While I am eager to get to work, I am disappointed that one of my first votes will be on a bill that does nothing to protect working people from skyrocketing premiums, loss of health coverage, or do anything significant to rein in Trump’s abuse of power,” Grijalva wrote in a statement to the Washington Examiner on Monday.
Explaining the delay in swearing in the House Democrat, Johnson insisted that Grijalva deserved the same “pomp and circumstance” of any other member, painting the picture of the House in session with her family in the balcony.
Grijalva “won her election after the House was out of session, so we have not had a full session,” Johnson said a few weeks ago. “She deserves to have all the pomp and circumstance that everybody else does.”
The current House GOP majority is two seats, with 219 Republicans and 214 Democrats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose two GOP votes and still pass legislation along party lines. Grijalva did not change the margin due to House numbers.
The House returned to Washington following the Senate’s passage of its version of the continuing resolution, and many Democrats plan to vote against the measure. The upper chamber’s version extends the CR to Jan. 31, 2026, and includes a minibus of three appropriations bills that would fund the Veterans Affairs and Agriculture departments, among others. The bill does not include any extension of the Obamacare subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of this year, that Democrats have been fighting for.
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) denounced the new bill and has advised his members to vote against it because it does not address premium Obamacare subsidies they wanted extended as part of the shutdown fight.
“We will not support spending legislation advanced by Senate Republicans that fails to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits,” Jeffries said in a statement.
