Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday was reminded by CNN’s Manu Raju he swore in Florida special election winners Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine “during a pro forma session. So why not swear in Adelita Grijalva who was elected two weeks ago? Does it have to do with her 218th signature on the Epstein discharge petition?” since Grijolva would be the 218th and final vote needed for it.

“It has nothing to do with that at all. We will swear her in when everybody gets back,” Johnson said, to which Raju coutnered with “Why not now?” leading Johnson to apparently finally cave on the matter, for now at least, saying “Uh – we’ll schedule it, I guess, as soon as she wants.”

Guess believe it when you see it. Still, Dems might have made a bigger deal out of this than necessary as, when it comes to the vote, it wouldn’t matter if Grijalva was already sworn in the day after she won or if it was five minutes into the next time the House is actually in session and who the hell knows when that’s going to be. MAYBE there’s a narrow possibility that Team MAGA still was holding out trying to peel Crazy Nancy Mace, High school dropout Lauren Boebert, and/or QAdulteress Marjorie Taylor Greene off from the petition, but who actually knows the rules about these things and whether Grijalva signing it triggers some point of no return. It’s also been a few weeks and if those three maniacs haven’t backed out yet then what’s going to change? The bottom line is that the vote petition’s meant to force seems extremely unlikely to happen until after the shutdown is resolved and the delay on swearing in Grijalva probably had more to do with that than Johnson trying to avoid the dreaded discharge petition vote – which will be very painful.