Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), who was roundly criticized last week after ThinkProgress reported the Florida congressmen questioning whether President Obama’s birth certificate is “legitimate,” confirmed today that he is indeed a birther.

When asked about the issue on Capitol Hill today, Stearns told reporters, “I am, shall we say, looking at all the evidence.” He called for credence to be given to birth certificate investigations, saying, “I don’t think it is unreasonable just to see what they have to say.” The Hill has more:

In April 2011, the White House released Obama’s long-form birth certificate to the public, hoping to put the matter to bed for good. But the issue has popped back up repeatedly — most recently in early March, when Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he had evidence the document was a fake.

Asked Tuesday if he thinks the birth certificate is legitimate, Stearns cited an inquiry by an Arizona sheriff – an apparent reference to Arpaio – and noted he believed there is “another investigation” as well.

“I think we are just going to hold in abeyance a final decision until we hear, you know, some of these people seem to have legitimate concerns, so I don’t think it is unreasonable just to see what they have to say,” Stearns said.

The man Stearns finds it reasonable to listen to is disgraced Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, generally known for rampant racial profiling against Latinos, but more recently for assembling a team of volunteer self-styled investigators to examine Obama’s birth certificate. Earlier this month, that team concluded that the birth certificate is a “forgery and fraud.”

Not so long ago, Stearns actually accepted the fact that President Obama was born in the United States. In 2009, his office looked into the matter and concluded that there was “no reason to question the President’s citizenship.” It’s unclear whether new evidence or a right-wing primary challenger has since led Stearns to dive into the murky world of birtherism.

Stearns is chairman of the the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, a perch he has used to spearhead the investigation into failed solar manufacturer Solyndra and Planned Parenthood.

During his 1971 Supreme Court confirmation process — and again in 1986, when he was elevated to chief justice, William Rehnquist was forced to explain a 1951 memo he’d written, as a clerk to then-Justice Robert H. Jackson. He told the Senate the document, which argued that the court should preserve “separate-but-equal” racial segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case, was merely written as “a statement of Justice Jackson’s tentative views for his own use.”

Rehnquist’s memo said:

I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by “liberal” colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.

Jackson and the unanimous court ended up rejecting the “tentative view,” overturning Plessy‘s embarrassing holding that public accommodations could legally be segregated along racial lines.

A Boston College Law Review article examines another newly discovered letter from Rehnquist highly critical of his former boss, calling Justice Jackson “half-cocked” and predicting he would not leave “a lasting influence on the court.” The letter, the authors say, appears to show “Rehnquist’s disappointment with Brown and the beginning of his outspoken criticism of the Warren Court.” The letter and other clues raise significant doubt about the veracity of Rehqnuist’s explanations of the 1951 memo. Had they been discovered at the time, the authors suspect, it “would have been a bombshell at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1971 and 1986.”

Instead, Rehnquist got to sit for more than 33 years on the high court — 19 of them as chief justice. Over that time he joined in countless opinions and dissents attempting to deny civil rights protections to LGBT Americans, oppose Affirmative Action, restrict freedom of speech, and undermine the separation of church and state.

Fourteen employees of a Florida law firm that specializes in foreclosure were summarily fired Friday for showing up to work wearing orange shirts. The law offices of Elizabeth R. Wellborn, P.A dismissed the employees even though several said their choice of attire was an innocent plan to match at a planned happy hour.

The law firm represents “institutional and private lenders in the reclamation of titled assets” — working to represent the mortgage lenders who are foreclosing on the homes of Floridians. The Sunshine State has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

The firm’s website boasts that its “Eviction Department has established key relationships with a network of attorneys that, collectively, expedite processes and keep costs as low as possible” for lenders.

As ABC News noted, Florida is an at-will employment state, meaning employers can dismiss employees for virtually any reason, with few rights or protections for workers. One employee told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, “I’m a single mom with four kids, and I’m out of a job just because I wore orange today.” The employees reportedly were given no severance pay. The firm told the Sun-Sentinel that it had no comment on the firings.

It seems Elizabeth R. Wellborn, P.A. specializes in expediting both throwing people out of their homes and out of their jobs.

Former Pennsylvania State Rep. Sam Rohrer (R) is leading the GOP field for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate, according to the latest PPP poll. He is seeking the right to challenge Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D) in November.

In a 2009 video, Rohrer revealed a shockingly radical interpretation of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — expressing a view that most of the last 100 years violates the Constitution.

Rohrer, campaigning for his own House resolution to assert state sovereignty, explained:

ROHRER: Over time, over the last many generations, the federal government — seeking to grow, as most governments tend to grow — have become increasingly involved in activities that have been reserved to the states, being involved in such things as education, or health care, or for that matter even highways and roads. A great many things the federal government has increasingly passed laws, appropriated tax dollars which are yours and mine, and attempted to force the states to implement laws for which then the federal government essentially has control, so today we spend billions of dollars in this commonwealth in education and welfare that are put upon us, effectively, by the federal government. The states being enticed by the monies.

Later in the video, he opines that the 10th amendment “says we are a sovereign state first of all. Federal government, do not any longer tell us or entice us to go in a direction for which we cannot afford to go nor properly should go.”

Watch the video here (from the 1:37 mark):

Under Rohrer’s interpretation of the constitution, the federal government may not operate Medicare or Medicaid, provide any safety net for poor families with depended children, enact any national educational standards, or even build or fund any interstate highways or bridges — even if they have a profound impact on interstate commerce. Rohrer makes no mention, however of any plan to give back the billions of dollars in federal highway funding Pennsylvania has received — or to give back Interstate 70.

With the recent felony conviction of then-Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (R), the task fell upon Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) to select a replacement for the chief elections officer of his state. Friday, he announced his pick: state Senator Connie Lawson (R).

Lawson, who served in the state senate since 1996 and as clerk of the Hendricks County Circuit Court for seven years before that, was one of the two original authors of Senate Bill 483. That law, enacted in 2005 and upheld by a divided U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, was among the nation’s first laws mandating strict photo identification requirements for voters.

Lawson’s concern about election integrity was also evident in another key vote — in 2010, she voted against the bill that made it legal for alcohol to be sold on election day in Indiana.

Along with Georgia, Indiana’s voter ID rules were the strictest in the nation until 2011 — making it significantly more difficult for voters without valid driver’s licenses to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Since the 2010 elections, Republican legislatures around the country, pushed by their allies at the right-wing corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been passing similar laws in an organized “war on voting.” These measures, of course, disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters who are less likely to have valid photo identification — and, probably not coincidentally, are most likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Daniels himself signed Lawson’s bill into law; her co-author said at the time that it was needed to guard against voter fraud.

Actual cases of voting fraud are so rare that a voter is much more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit fraud at the polls, though White proved to be the rare exception. He registered and voted in the wrong district, falsely claiming his ex-wife’s residence as his own. Lawson’s law and voter ID laws like it do nothing to prevent that kind of fraud. White had ironically campaigned on election integrity and a pledge to “protect and defend Indiana’s Voter ID law to ensure our elections are fair and protect the most basic and precious right and responsibility of our democracy-voting.”

Hopefully, at least Lawson will oversee the state’s voter suppression without the hypocrisy White demonstrated.

In a cell phone call moments before his death, Trayvon Martin told a teenage girl he “was being hounded by a strange man on a cellphone who ran after him, cornered him and confronted him.” The girl recounted the call, which is confirmed by phone logs, to ABC News:

“He said this man was watching him, so he put his hoodie on. He said he lost the man,” Martin’s friend said. “I asked Trayvon to run, and he said he was going to walk fast. I told him to run but he said he was not going to run.”

Eventually he would run, said the girl, thinking that he’d managed to escape. But suddenly the strange man was back, cornering Martin.

“Trayvon said, ‘What, are you following me for,’ and the man said, ‘What are you doing here.’ Next thing I hear is somebody pushing, and somebody pushed Trayvon because the head set just fell.

The new information about the phone call casts further doubt on the account George Zimmerman, Martin’s killer, told the police. The Miami Herald reported Zimmerman told the police “he had stepped out of his truck to check the name of the street he was on when Trayvon attacked him from behind as he walked back to his truck.”

You can find out everything you need to know about Martin’s tragic death here.

A Republican congressman from Illinois praised a controversial new voting measure at a town hall last month, calling for a national version of the law that could disenfranchise millions.

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who grabbed headlines for owing his ex-wife over $100,000 in child support and defending big banks against irate constituents, lauded the recent move by some states (Alabama, Kansas, and Tennessee) to require that voters present proof of citizenship before they are given a ballot. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that seven percent of Alabama’s citizens — 240,000 people — do not possess proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate, and could be disenfranchised.

But Walsh wasn’t content with just three states employing such laws. “I don’t know why we don’t mandate at the federal level that you have to show proof of citizenship to vote,” declared the Illinois freshman at a town hall in Palatine on February 25.

WALSH: This just seems really obvious to me. Federal law says only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. We typically make this a state-by-state issue, but I don’t know why we don’t enforce that at the federal level. I don’t know why we don’t mandate at the federal level that you have to show proof of citizenship to vote.

Watch it, courtesy of YouTube user IL08RawFootage:

Perhaps Walsh’s proposal would have some merit if a widespread problem of non-citizens trying to vote actually existed. In reality, there is absolutely no hint of a whiff of a problem with non-Americans voting in American elections. Facing prison, a serious fine, and deportation if caught, why would a non-citizen possibly risk all that in order to cast a single vote?

This phantom prospect of voter fraud is the sole justification conservatives use to rationalize stripping the right to vote from millions of citizens. If the Brennan Center’s estimate for the disenfranchisement rate in Alabama is similar across the country, at least 15 million Americans could be disenfranchised in this year’s presidential election were Walsh’s vision to become reality.

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.

• The U.S. Supreme Court will not take a Louisiana case challenging the 2010 congressional reapportionment. The state had claimed it was due an extra seat in the U.S. House based on alleged inclusion of undocumented residents in the census count.
• A DC circuit court is considering a Department of Justice appeal of a ruling that gave a former Defense contractor the green light to sue former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (R) for his role in alleged torture.
• Corporations may be able to take tax deductions for their secret contributions to 501(c)(4) political groups as a “business expense.”
• Bad news for an alleged Ponzi schemer: the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals restored a class-action case against former Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford.
• A proposal for a Minnesota photo ID constitutional amendment to make it harder for citizens to vote advanced to the floor of the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives.
• The Supreme Court will consider two death row cases, focusing on whether defendants need be mentally competent for their federal habeas review.