Every office along the second floor of the Longworth House Office Building looks welcoming, flags lined up nicely, most with visitor sign-in logs out front.
Except for the one where the plaque out front reads, “Representative Adelita S. Grijalva, Arizona” — but the doors are locked, with newspapers and internal mail piling up out front.
Grijalva’s (D)offices — both in Washington and back in her district — are closed, leaving the constituents of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District without representation or a single staffer who can answer questions as the government shutdown stretches into its second week.
The phone lines do not even have a courtesy message telling constituents how to reach out to Arizona’s senators for help. The voice answering the phone in the Tucson office is a recording of Grijalva’s father, the late Raúl Grijalva (D). He’s the 11-term lawmaker whose death in March prompted the special election that his daughter won by almost 40 percentage points.
Despite Grijalva’s victory more than two weeks ago, House Republican Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has refused to swear her into office.
After a fleeting effort last week to get sworn in, she has decamped back to Tucson to mount a media campaign designed to shame the speaker into letting her make history as Arizona’s first Latina in Congress.
“I have the will and responsibility of almost 800,000 people to represent, and I need to fight for them. And so I’m going to make this as public as possible,” she said during a videoconference interview Tuesday. “I’m going to continue to highlight the hypocrisy and the fact that this is dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy.”…