Turner: “Chaos caucus” wants to block any Congressional action
Rep. Mike Turner says there is a “chaos caucus” who want to block any Congressional action
07:23
Washington — Rep. Mike Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday derided a group of lawmakers that he says have continued to “stop everything” in Congress amid opposition toward additional aid to Ukraine and a possible effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“Unfortunately, the chaos caucus has continued to want to stop everything that occurs in Congress,” the Ohio Republican said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “It’s not as if they have an alternative plan, they’re just against those things that are necessary that we’re doing.”
Turner said an aid package to Ukraine in its war against Russia is “necessary for national security,” noting that it has widespread support in Congress despite some opposition on the fringes. After a commitment by Johnson to bring forward supplemental funding for U.S. allies when lawmakers return from recess next week, Turner expressed confidence that an aid package can pass through both chambers and receive the president’s signature.
On the effort to oust Johnson, which has been pushed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene due to frustrations with his handling of government funding, Turner said that House Democratic leadership has been clear that they will not join House conservatives looking to remove him from his post, likely saving his speakership should it reach that point.
Rep. Mike Turner on “Face the Nation,” March 31, 2024.
CBS News
Greene, a Georgia Republican, filed a motion to vacate earlier this month, teasing a possible vote to oust Johnson. That effort could gain steam should Johnson bring up a vote on funding for Ukraine. But it remains unclear whether there’s enough political will among the House GOP conference more broadly to oust and replace another speaker.
The House Republican conference has had a turbulent year, with five departures in recent months that have shrunk the already-narrow GOP majority. Turner said that the pattern shows how “radical” fringes and individuals can cause disruptions in the conference.
“That’s what we have seen. That certainly makes it difficult for people who just want to get the job done,” Turner said. “In the area of national security, I think Speaker Johnson made it very clear that we have his support to get national security agenda items done and I think we will.”
Kaia Hubbard
Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital based in Washington, D.C.
Rep. Mike Turner says there is a “chaos caucus” who want to block any Congressional action – CBS News
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House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Turner tells “Face the Nation” that there is a “chaos caucus that wants to stop everything that a person in Congress does” as Speaker Mike Johnson faces a possible motion to vacate.
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Republican-led states file lawsuit to block Biden’s student loan repayment plan – CBS News
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Eleven Republican-led states are suing the Biden administration to block the president’s latest student loan forgiveness program. The federal lawsuit argues that the Saving on a Valuable Education program, known as SAVE, isn’t different compared to Mr. Biden’s first attempt at student loan cancellation, which the Supreme Court struck down last year. CBS News White House reporter Bo Erickson reports.
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A federal appeals court early on Wednesday extended its hold on a new Texas immigration law, meaning the measure cannot go into effect while litigation continues.
A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a 2-1 votesaid in a decision issued overnightthat the statute, known as Senate Bill 4, should remain blocked. The same court temporarily froze the law March 19, just hours after the Supreme Court said it could go into effect.
“For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration — the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens—is exclusively a federal power,” Judge Priscilla Richman wrote for the majority.
She cited in part a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that invalided a similar law in Arizona.
Whatever the state’s criticisms about the federal government’s “actions and inactions” on immigration, it is the president’s role “to decide whether, and if so, how to pursue noncitizens illegally present in the United States,” Richman wrote.
The state law would allow police to arrest migrants suspected of illegally crossing the border from Mexico and impose criminal penalties. It would also empower state judges to order people to be deported to Mexico.
The dispute is the latest clash between the Biden administration and Texas over immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Texas could potentially now ask the Supreme Court to allow the law to go into effect. In the meantime, the appeals court holds another hearing on April 3.
Richman and Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez voted to block the law. Judge Andrew Oldham voted for it to go into effect.
Richman and Oldham are both Republican appointees, while Ramirez was appointed by President Joe Biden.
It was the same lineup of judges that issued the temporary block.
Oldham wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion saying the law should not be blocked in full because of hypothetical concerns about how it would be enforced.
Because of the federal government’s struggles to control immigration, “the state is forever helpless” to respond if it cannot legislate on the issue, he said.
“Texas can do nothing because Congress apparently did everything, yet federal non-enforcement means Congress’s everything is nothing,” Oldham wrote.
A federal judge blocked the law after the Biden administration sued, but the appeals court initially said in a brief order that it could go into effect March 10 if the Supreme Court declined to intervene. In the meantime, the appeals court delayed a decision on whether to impose a more permanent block during Texas’ appeal.
The Supreme Court initially put the law on hold while it determined what steps to take, but on March 19 said it would allow the measure to go into effect, with the understanding that the appeals court would act quickly on the underlying case.
The Supreme Court’s order prompted alarm among immigrant rights activists amid confusion on the ground about whether the law could be enforced immediately.
The appeals court appeared to get the message and immediately imposed the new hold on the law while it considered Texas’ appeal of the district court injunction.
A block on the Telegram short message service in Spain has been lifted, the national court in Madrid announced on Monday.
Judge Santiago Pedraz had provisionally lifted his blocking order first imposed on Friday, the announcement said. The judge was awaiting a report on Telegram that he had called for from the general commissioner for messaging services, it added.
The block was imposed following complaints submitted by several media companies against Telegram for infringement of rules on the protection of copyright.
Telegram could nevertheless still be accessed from Spain up until Monday. Consumer protection bodies in Spain, where Telegram has several million users, had criticized the block as disproportionate.
Country blocks can in any case be circumvented relatively easily by means of virtual private networks (VPNs).
Pedraz ordered the block after he had made repeated requests for administrative assistance from the authorities of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, where Telegram is registered, to no avail.
The authorities there had not cooperated in clarifying the identity of the owners of Telegram accounts from which copyrighted content had been illegally distributed, the Spanish court found.
The El País daily reported that Telegram regularly refused to provide information to the Spanish authorities.
As the service protected the identity of its users to a greater extent than for example its larger competitor, WhatsApp, it is preferred by regime critics in dictatorships. But for this reason, Telegram also carries channels with criminal or extremist content.
Analyst and author Ken Block joins The Takeout to discuss his new book, “Disproven.” Block explains his hiring by the Trump campaign to search for voter fraud, his fact-driven investigation into claims of voter fraud and where the claims may have come from.
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Two conservative groups are asking a federal court to block the Biden administration’s plan to cancel $39 billion in student loans for more than 800,000 borrowers.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in Michigan, the groups argue that the administration overstepped its power when it announced the forgiveness in July, just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down a broader cancellation plan pushed by President Joe Biden.
It asks a judge to rule the cancellation illegal and stop the Education Department from carrying it out while the case is decided. The suit was filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance on behalf of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Cato Institute.
The Education Department called the suit “a desperate attempt from right wing special interests to keep hundreds of thousands of borrowers in debt.”
“We are not going to back down or give an inch when it comes to defending working families,” the department said in a statement.
It’s part of a wave of legal challenges Republicans have leveled at the Biden administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate student debt for millions of Americans. Biden has said he will pursue a different cancellation plan after the Supreme Court decision, and his administration is separately unrolling a more generous repayment plan that opponents call a “backdoor attempt” at cancellation.
The Biden administration announced July 14 that it would soon forgive loans for 804,000 borrowers enrolled in income-driven repayment plans. The plans have long offered cancellation after borrowers make 20 or 25 years of payments, but “past administrative failures” resulted in inaccurate payments counts that set borrowers back on their progress toward forgiveness, the department said.
The new action was announced as a “one-time adjustment” that would count certain periods of past nonpayment as if borrowers had been making payments during that time. It moved 804,000 borrowers across the 20- or 25-year mark needed for cancellation, and it moved millions of others closer to that threshold.
It’s meant to address a practice known as forbearance steering, in which student loan servicers hired by the government wrongly pushed borrowers to go into forbearance — a temporary pause on payments because of hardship — even if they would have been better served by enrolling in one of the income-driven repayment plans.
Under the one-time fix, past periods in forbearance were also counted as progress toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program that offers cancellation after 10 years of payments while working in a government or nonprofit job.
Biden’s action was illegal, the lawsuit says, because it wasn’t authorized by Congress and didn’t go through a federal rulemaking process that invites public feedback.
“No authority allows the Department to count non-payments as payments,” the lawsuit says. It adds that the action came in “a press release that neither identified the policy’s legal authority nor considered its exorbitant price tag.”
The conservative groups say Biden’s plan undercuts Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The Mackinac Center and Cato Institute say they employ borrowers who are working toward student loan cancellation through the program. They say Biden’s action illegally accelerates progress toward relief, diminishing the benefit for nonprofit employers.
“This unlawful reduction in the PSLF service requirement injures public service employers that rely on PSLF to recruit and retain college-educated employees,” the suit alleges.
The Cato Institute previously sued the administration over the cancellation plan that was struck down by the Supreme Court. The Mackinac Center is separately challenging Biden’s pause on student loan payments, which is scheduled to end this fall with payments resuming Oct. 1.
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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A man who posed as an undercover police officer kidnapped a woman in Seattle, drove her hundreds of miles to his home in Oregon and locked her in a cinder block cell until she bloodied her hands breaking the door to escape, the FBI said Wednesday.
Negasi Zuberi, 29, faces a federal interstate kidnapping charge, and authorities said they are looking for additional victims after linking him to violent sexual assaults in at least four more states.
“This woman was kidnapped, chained, sexually assaulted, and locked in a cinderblock cell,” Stephanie Shark, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Portland field office, said in a news release. “Police say she beat the door with her hands until they were bloody in order to break free. Her quick thinking and will to survive may have saved other women from a similar nightmare.”
After the woman escaped from his home in Klamath Falls, Zuberi fled the southern Oregon city of roughly 22,000 people but was arrested by state police in Reno, Nevada, the next afternoon, the FBI said.
Court records don’t list an attorney who might speak on Zuberi’s behalf. He hasn’t been assigned a public defender in Oregon yet, as he’s still in the process of being transferred from Nevada, which can take several weeks, said Kevin Sonoff, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon.
According to the FBI, Zuberi also went by the names Sakima, Justin Hyche and Justin Kouassi, and he has lived in multiple states since 2016, possibly including California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Alabama, and Nevada.
According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon, Zuberi solicited the woman, identified only as Adult Victim 1, in the early-morning hours of July 15 to engage in prostitution along Aurora Avenue in Seattle, an area known for sex work. Afterward, Zuberi told the woman he was an undercover officer, showed her a badge, pointed a stun gun at her, and placed her in handcuffs and leg irons before putting her in the back of his vehicle, the complaint says.
He then drove the woman to his home in Oregon, stopping along the way to sexually assault her, the complaint states. When they arrived, about seven hours after he first encountered her in Seattle, he put her in a makeshift cell he had built in his garage — a cinder block cell with a door of metal bars — and said he was leaving to do paperwork.
The woman “briefly slept and awoke to the realization that she would likely die if she did not attempt to escape,” the complaint says.
She started punching the metal door and broke some of its welded joints, creating a small opening which she climbed through, Klamath Police Capt. Rob Reynolds said at a news conference.
“When she was trying to escape the cell itself, she repeatedly punched the door with her own hands,” Reynolds said. “She had several lacerations along her knuckles.”
The victim saw Zuberi’s vehicle parked in the garage, opened it, grabbed his gun and then took off, leaving blood on a wooden fence she climbed over to escape, the complaint says. She flagged down a passing driver, who called 911.
Two Nevada State Patrol officers tracked Zuberi down at a Walmart parking lot in Reno the next day, July 16, the complaint says. He was in his car holding one of his children in the front seat while talking to his wife, who was standing outside the vehicle. He initially refused to get out of the car when the officers asked and instead cut himself with a sharp object and tried to destroy his phone, according to the complaint, which notes that Zuberi eventually surrendered and that the child wasn’t harmed.
According to the complaint, investigators interviewed Zuberi’s wife and neighbors. Authorities declined to say if there was any indication that any of them had been aware of the Seattle woman’s abduction.
Investigators said that when they searched Zuberi’s home and garage, they found the makeshift cell, the woman’s purse and handwritten notes. One of the notes was titled “Operation Take Over,” and included a bullet list with entries that read “Leave phone at home” and “Make sure they don’t have a bunch of ppl (sic) in their life. You don’t want any type of investigation.”
Another handwritten document appeared to include a rough sketch for an underground structure using concrete blocks, foam insulation and waterproof concrete.
The FBI said Zuberi may have used other methods of gaining control of women, including drugging their drinks. The agency said it was setting up a website asking anyone who believes they may have been a victim to come forward.
The Klamath Falls rental home where Zuberi allegedly took the woman is owned by the city’s mayor, Carol Westfall, and her husband, Kevin, according to property records. The house backs onto a park and is on a residential street, less than a quarter-mile (half a kilometer) from a highway.
Court records show that after Zuberi’s arrest, the couple had him evicted.
“We are shocked and dismayed by what has occurred,” the Westfalls said in an email. “We applaud the actions of the woman who helped capture this person and prevent him from committing further atrocities.”
The Westfalls also praised local, state and federal law enforcement for their work on the case. They declined to respond to queries about their interactions with Zuberi.
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Johnson reported from Seattle. Andrew Selsky in Salem, Oregon, and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed.
