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Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

On April 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson swore in two Republicans who had won special U.S. House elections in Florida the day before, even though the chamber was between business sessions. The House was not in recess but was in a “pro forma” session with a few minutes of business every day.

The exact same situation arose on September 23 when Democrat Adelita Grijalva won an Arizona special election to succeed her late father in the House. Since then, she’s been showing up in Washington expecting to be sworn in during daily “pro forma” sessions to no avail.

So why is Johnson stalling? It’s not because Grijalva’s swearing-in threatens the GOP majority; it doesn’t. So the only plausible explanation is that she represents the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which presumably Donald Trump has instructed Johnson to avoid for as long as possible. This legislation would compel the release of whatever DoJ has on the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, which is of great interest not just to Trump critics but to many MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe Epstein was at or near the center of a vast global cabal.

Johnson’s excuse for not letting the citizens of the seventh congressional district of Arizona be represented in Congress is that those mean old Democrats closed down the federal government. First of all, both parties bear at least partial responsibility for the shutdown; Johnson and John Thune refused to negotiate with Democrats over the concessions they requested in exchange for voting to keep the government open. Second, Johnson wasn’t compelled to adjourn the House; the Senate has remained in session. And third, as noted above, the House isn’t in recess, so Johnson is willfully denying Grijalva her rights as a duly elected member. He originally said he’d swear her in on October 7, then delayed it again. His excuse doesn’t make sense. Per The Guardian:

A spokesperson for Johnson pointed to his comments signaling that Grijalva will be sworn in when the House returns to session, but that will not happen until funding is restored to the government.

“The House will come back into session and do its work as soon as Chuck Schumer allows us to reopen the government,” Johnson said today, referring to the top Senate Democrat whom the Republicans blame for the funding lapse.

The two things have nothing to do with each other, so it’s pretty clear the Speaker is just stalling. Maybe in some back room of the Capitol, MAGA goons are putting the screws to Republicans Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace to get at least one of them to remove her name from the discharge petition introduced by Democrat Ro Khanna and staunchly anti-Trump Republican Thomas Massie. But each of these women has strong reasons for caring about the Epstein files (Boebert and Greene, for example, rose in GOP political circles in part because of their sympathy for the QAnon cult, in which Epstein is an important devil figure).

So it’s unclear what Johnson hopes to accomplish by denying Grijalva her seat, unless he’s just waiting for a wild news cycle in which nobody will notice anything he’s doing. That this is a real possibility ought to concern us all.

Johnson Seems to Be Stalling to Block Epstein-Files Vote

Johnson Seems to Be Stalling to Block Epstein-Files Vote