Republican James Jett, the clerk of the circuit court for Clay County, Florida and a primary challenger to 12-term incumbent Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) said today that Stearns tried to buy him out of the race.

The Florida Times-Union reports that Jett claimed Stearns offered him, through a middleman, “a job on Stearns’ campaign staff or cash to cover the approximately $25,000 Jett has personally spent on his congressional run,” and possibly “a job heading the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or a U.S. marshal position” pending future vacancies. Jett claimed to have audio recordings of the conversations, though he has not yet made those public.

Jett said he reported this to the FBI and that the Bureau is looking into the matter. A spokesman for the FBI’s Jacksonville bureau told ThinkProgress that as a matter of policy, they do not confirm or deny investigations.

According to Clay Today, a local newspaper, a Stearns spokesman denied the charges, saying:

Mr. Jett requested a meeting with Rep. Stearns through Stearns’ supporters indicating that he intended to drop out of the race. At the meeting, Jett announced that he would not drop out of the race. Neither Stearns nor his supporters suggested that Jett receive anything in return for dropping out and the meeting was terminated.

If the FBI does open an investigation, Stearns would join several Republican colleagues on the list of ongoing ethics scandals.

Since taking office, President Obama has actually expanded gun owners’ rights — the most significant guns legislation he signed was a law allowing people to carry guns in national parks. Nevertheless, the chance that he could win a second term reportedly is pushing gun owners to stockpile guns. “People are terrified he’s going to get re-elected and then he won’t care about getting votes next time. He’ll just pass whatever legislation he wants,” DeWayne Irwin, owner of the Cheaper Than Dirt gun store in north Fort Worth, told Star-Telegram. Irwin’s store set a sales record in February.

In 2011, the FBI received more than 16.3 million inquires from people running background checks on potential gun purchasers. That’s up from 11.4 million in 2007. Over four years, more than 1 million of those requests have come from Texas, the second most in the nation behind Kentucky. And while the number of gun owners grows, gun sellers are seeing fear of an administration crackdown:

“I’m constantly getting questions from people in the gun community about this [issue],” said Alan Korwin, author of nine gun law books, including Gun Laws of America, and operator of gunlaws.com. “People are concerned that if Obama wins, as a lame duck, he will go after firearms in a way we have never seen before.

“We saw a fire sale when he was elected last time,” he said. “But the speculation is that now … with his need to get re-elected gone, the sky is the limit on attacking the Second Amendment.” [...]

A prominent businessman recently shopped at Cheaper Than Dirt, saying that “Republicans don’t have a prayer against Obama” this year. That man, Irwin said, spent $25,000 on ammunition, magazines and other gun paraphernalia.

“The folks paying attention to the political climate think this might be an opportunity to stock up,” Irwin said.

This gun rush is no doubt influenced by fantasies being spread by the nation’s leading gun group. National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, recently claimed that Obama would eliminate the Second Amendment — and guns owners’ rights — if he is re-elected. “All that first term, lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term,” he said at the Conservative Poliltical Action Conference last month. Once he does not have another election to worry about, LaPierre told conservatives that Obama would “get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms’ freedom.”

Last Sunday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia addressed the Living the Catholic Faith Conference conference in Denver, Colorado. During his speech, however, the justice appeared to suggest that Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians are somehow less rational than people who share his faith:

In Washington, Scalia said, the pundits and media couldn’t believe in a miracle performed under their noses.

“My point is not that reason and intellect need to be laid aside,” Scalia said. “A faith without a rational basis should be laid aside as false. … What is irrational is to reject a priori the possibility of miracles in general and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in particular.”

“A priori” is a philosophical term which is usually used to refer to a claim that one has knowledge independent of experience, so it is unclear how anyone could reject the central Christian belief that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead under Scalia’s standard given that no living person was around to actually experience it. More importantly, though, the clear implication of Scalia’s statement appears to be than all non-Christians — or approximately two-thirds of the world’s population — are “irrational.”

If Scalia indeed holds this view, than it raises serious questions about whether he can set aside this belief when called upon to interpret a Constitution that requires all religious beliefs to be treated with equal dignity. Moreover, it could have profound implications for the burgeoning debate over whether the Obama Administration’s contraceptive access rules are upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1990, Scalia wrote the seminal Supreme Court case interpreting the Constitution’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith, Employment Div. v. Smith. In Smith, Scalia explained that a law does not suddenly become unconstitutional because someone raises a religious objection to it. Scalia explained that “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a ‘valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).’” This is why a law ensuring access to contraception is constitutional even if several Catholic bishops object to it.

Smith, however, did not involve Christians — it involved members of a Native American faith that wanted to use the drug peyote in a sacred ritual even though that drug was banned. Hopefully, Scalia recognizes that the rule he announced in Smith must apply equally to faiths he views as “rational” and those he also may view as “irrational.”

Mitt Romney may have won the Vermont primary on Super Tuesday, but his “corporations are people, my friends” line took a hit, as more than two dozen cities across the state voted overwhelmingly in support of amending the US Constitution to eliminate “corporate personhood” that was introduced with the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court.

Local television station NECN reported on the returns:

Organizers say the effort to urge Congress to amend the U.S. Constitution to help keep money from having too much influence in politics was passed by 53 Vermont communities on Town Meeting Day.

State. Sen. Virginia Lyons says there are a number of communities that considered the “corporate personhood” amendment issue Tuesday that still haven’t reported their results.

Vermont’s communities join a quickly growing list of cities across the country that have taken up the issue of corporate personhood. Smaller cities like Boulder, Colorado and Portland, Maine joined the nation’s two biggest—New York and Los Angeles—in introducing measures designed to push back against the Citizens United ruling.

Duluth City, Minnesota, Madison, Wisconsin, Corvallis, Oregon, Jamestown, Colorado and the entire state of Montana have also taken steps against Citizens United as well. See the full list of cities who have introduced anti-corporate personhood resolutions here.

A former congressman said he and his wife were denied the right to vote last night in their Tennessee hometown after poll workers said he had been removed from the voting rolls. Lincoln Davis, a Democrat who served two terms, leaving office in 2011, told the The Nashville Tennessean:

“We walked in and they told me I was not a registered voter. I had been taken off the list,” said Davis, who served two terms representing the fourth congressional district of Tennessee, leaving office in 2011.

“These are people who I grew up with. I told them I live here. I went to school about 20 yards away.” [...]

“It’s always been this way and today, for some reason, they change it,” he said. “I had a sense inside of uneasiness when I was told that I was not allowed to vote. They didn’t offer me a provisional ballot, or anything, just told me I wasn’t registered.”

The Tennessee Department of State said it would conduct an investigation into the matter.

Like many states, Tennessee passed new voting restrictions last year, including a voter ID law. While that doesn’t appear to be the problem in Davis’ case, the incident highlights how voting restrictions, which are being heightened in statehouses across the country in a nominal attempt to crack down on voter fraud, can often ensnare legitimate voters. And while there few problems were reported with the new law in last night’s primary, there has nonetheless been a troubling pattern of the voter ID law in the state making it more difficult for citizens to vote.

In Ohio yesterday, an 86-year-old World War II veteran was denied the right to vote after his ID was rejected at the polls.

Voter ID laws are popular among conservative lawmakers because they disproportionately disenfranchise poor, student and minority voters, all of which are typically more left-of-center than the average voter. They also violate the federal Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on state laws that discriminate against minority voters.

According to Wisconsin Judge David Flanagan, they violate the Wisconsin Constitution too. In an order issued yesterday, Flanagan temporarily suspended his state’s voter ID law and strongly hinted that he will eventually strike the law down permanently.

As Flanagan’s opinion explains, the Wisconsin Constitution provides particularly strong protections for the right to vote — “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district,” regardless of whether or not they have an ID. Moreover, the state supreme court has interpreted this constitutional provision very robustly. “Voting is a constitutional right,” according to the Wisconsin supremes, “any statute that denies a qualified elector the right to vote is unconstitutional and void.”

Flanagan accordingly subjects the law to the highest level of constitutional scrutiny, and finds it deeply lacking. As he explains, the law disenfranchises voters, sometimes in absurd ways, and targets a problem that is only slightly more real than fairies and unicorns:

[F]orty uncontested affidavits offer a picture of carousel visits to government offices, delay, dysfunctional computer systems, misinformation and significant investment of time to avoid being turned away at the ballot box. This is burdensome, all the more for the elderly and the disabled. . . . Mr. Ricky Tyrone Lewis is 58 years old, a Marine Corps Veteran and a lifelong Milwaukee resident. He was able to offer proof of his honorable discharge but Milwaukee County has been unable to find the record of his birth so he cannot obtain a voter ID card. Ms. Ruthelle Frank, now 84, is a lifelong resident of Brokaw, Wisconsin and a member of her town board since 1996. She has voted in every election over the past 64 years but she does not have a voter ID card. She located her birth certificate but found that her name was misspelled. She was advised to obtain a certified copy of the incorrect birth certificate and try to use that to obtain a voter ID card. . . .

The plaintiffs do not dispute, and the court certainly accepts fully the value of maintaining the accuracy and security of the ballot process. At this point, however, the record is uncontested that recent investigations of vote irregularities, both in the City of Milwaukee and by the Attorney General have produced extremely little evidence of fraud and that which has been uncovered, improper use of absentee ballots and unqualified voters, would not have been prevented by the photo identification requirements of Act 23.

Unfortunately, however, Flanagan’s decision will ultimately appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, whose current members have a long history of handing down ideologically conservative 4-3 decisions.