Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva is set to be sworn in by House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday, seven weeks after she won her special election in Arizona. Grijalva’s swearing-in will set the stage for the House to move forward on the long-delayed vote to compel the release of more files related to the federal government’s case against Jeffrey Epstein.
On Tuesday’s “The Weeknight,” Grijalva slammed Johnson for the delay. “This is unprecedented. It’s undemocratic. It’s unconstitutional. It’s illegal,” she said. “Nobody, no member-elect should ever be in the situation again where 813,000 people are silenced because one person wants to play politics with their swearing-in.”
The Arizona Democrat said that in the last seven weeks, there was a lot of “chess playing” behind the scenes. Johnson has publicly blamed the government shutdown as the reason for the delay.
“There was no reason I should be in this position,” Grijalva explained. “We had several pro forma sessions; there have been entire freshman classes that were sworn in during a shutdown, and the fact that the Senate hadn’t passed the CR [continuing resolution] has nothing to do with me.”
Grijalva said she believed her swearing-in was delayed “to give Speaker Johnson more time in order to try to convince one of those four Republicans to take their name off” the discharge petition to release the Epstein files.
If Grijalva signs the petition and becomes the 218th member to do so, it will have reached the necessary threshold to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote on the measure. Grijalva said she hopes the release of the files will allow “the survivors to finally have justice” and provide “transparency” for Americans. She called the discharge petition a “vote of values” and said it raised an important question for lawmakers: “Are you going to protect people who committed pedophilia and raped children and women? Or are you going to say, undeniably: ‘That’s abhorrent, and we’re not going to stand by anyone who committed those kinds of crimes’?” You can watch Grijalva’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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