During her first trip to Capitol Hill after winning her seat last month, Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva set up shop in a small conference room in a corner of a House office building.
The walls were beige, the furnishings nondescript, the ventilation minimal and the temperature so unseasonably warm that Ms. Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, laid a hand-held fan on the table to keep herself and visitors cool.
These are not the usual trappings for an incoming member of Congress.
Four floors below that stuffy conference room was the office that Ms. Grijalva, 54, was expecting to occupy. It had belonged to her father, whose seat she was elected to fill after his death in March. A plaque with her name had already been placed by the door.
But that door was locked, and Ms. Grijalva did not have the keys. Instead, in what should have been her first week as a newly elected congresswoman, Republicans were refusing to seat her.
With a fight over government funding raging and Speaker Mike Johnson toiling to avoid a vote that would force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files, he has opted to keep the House out of session — and Ms. Grijalva out of her seat.
With no apparent end to the impasse, she is left in congressional limbo. Mr. Johnson said last week that he would swear her in once the House returned to session. But he then abruptly canceled planned votes again this week, forcing Ms. Grijalva to wait even longer to represent the people in her district, even as the shutdown threatens to disrupt government services.
“We don’t have any official capacity to be able to do things, and that is the real frustration,” Ms. Grijalva said in an interview, minutes after learning about the schedule change.
Mr. Johnson’s office said in a statement that it was “standard practice” for new members to take office only when the chamber was fully meeting. But Democrats have cried foul, noting that Mr. Johnson swore in two Republicans this year when the House was not in session for legislative business.
Instead, Democrats have accused the speaker of stalling because Ms. Grijalva has promised to back a bipartisan effort to force a vote on the release of the Justice Department’s investigative files on the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The White House and Republican leaders staunchly oppose that measure.
“I feel like there is a lot of dishonesty, a lack of transparency,” Ms. Grijalva said. “Why the rules are different for me — the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files.”
Even before handily winning her race last month, Ms. Grijalva committed to signing on to a so-called discharge petition, which would force the House to vote on whether to release the Epstein files. The petition, backed by a bipartisan group, needs the signatures of a majority of the House — 218 members — to succeed. Ms. Grijalva is poised to be the 218th.
But until the measure reaches that threshold, lawmakers who have already signed it can withdraw their signatures. White House aides have been pressuring the three Republican women who have signed to pull their support, according to three people familiar with their efforts who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about private discussions.
In delaying Ms. Grijalva’s swearing-in, Republican leaders have provided more time for such a pressure campaign. Still, the three lawmakers — Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — have showed no signs of wavering so far. A fourth Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, is leading the effort.
After Mr. Johnson canceled this week’s planned votes, several Democrats accused him of keeping the House out of commission to delay a vote on the Epstein files.
“House Republicans care more about protecting the Epstein files than protecting the American people,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at a news conference on Friday.
But before the schedule change, Mr. Johnson said lawmakers would not return to session until Senate Democrats accepted Republicans’ stopgap spending measure.
“The House will come back into session and do its work as soon as Chuck Schumer allows us to reopen the government,” he said at a news conference. “That’s plain and simple.”
In the meantime, Ms. Grijalva’s life is on hold. Since she has not been sworn in, she cannot use any resources from her congressional office to serve her constituents. She cannot hire staff, and she cannot set up an office in her district.
The office in Washington that will eventually be hers is vacant. Phone calls there are redirected to her father’s old office in Tucson, which Ms. Grijalva said was closed and emptied before her election.
“There is no office,” she said. “There is no staff.”
The limits of her in-between status were evident when she came to Washington last week, eager to join her soon-to-be-colleagues as they pressed Republicans to negotiate on a deal to fund the government.
It was a hectic few days. Ms. Grijalva was greeted with a raucous welcome at a Democratic caucus meeting, then attended various news conferences around the Capitol grounds and filmed videos on the steps leading into the House chamber.
But when she arrived every morning, Ms. Grijalva and her staff-to-be went through security as if she were any other visitor. Because she was not yet a duly sworn member of Congress, she had to be escorted around the Capitol, including when she entered and exited the building.
She joined scores of Democrats on Tuesday when they tried to force action during what is known as a pro forma session, a perfunctory meeting that the House holds every three days as a matter of course when is it in recess.
Since Ms. Grijalva and Mr. Johnson were both in Washington at the start of the week, Democrats argued that the speaker could have used that moment to swear her in. In April, Mr. Johnson swore in two Florida Republicans, Representatives Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine, during a pro forma session.
Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 House Democrat, urged Mr. Johnson to follow that precedent in a letter last week.
“Any delay in swearing in Representative-elect Grijalva unnecessarily deprives her constituents of representation and calls into question if the motive behind the delay is to further avoid the release of the Epstein files,” she wrote.
To get on the House floor, Ms. Grijalva had to be accompanied by congressional staff. She stood alongside her fellow Democrats as they fought to be recognized so they could highlight Republicans’ absence from Washington. Some of them shouted for Republicans to swear in Ms. Grijalva, but as a guest, she could only watch.
The session lasted three minutes, and she left, still not a member of Congress.
“It’s taking some of the joy away,” Ms. Grijalva said on Friday. “And also, I was overwhelmingly elected. My constituents want me to get to work. And you know, I can’t.”
Catie Edmondson and Annie Karni contributed reporting.