A couple of months ago, Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen held a public event with voters in his Oklahoma district, and the congressman delivered a curious warning about Islamic law. “You’ve got Sharia law trying to be established in America today,” Brecheen declared.
When I first saw this in August, I laughed to myself, made a note about GOP politicians who still think it’s 2014, and moved on.
What I didn’t realize was just how many other Republican officials were thinking along the same lines.
As this week got underway, for example, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama published an item via social media that read, “BAN SHARIA LAW. It has NO PLACE in America.”
Four days earlier, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also argued via social media, “Sharia law has no place in the USA and is incompatible with the Constitution.” The Republican governor’s missive appeared alongside a related item about a legislative effort in the Sunshine State to ban Sharia law.
Two weeks earlier, Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who’s currently running for state attorney general in Texas, argued during a Fox Business appearance, “I don’t think Texas should be subject to the advancement of Sharia.”
Two days earlier, even Donald Trump condemned Sharia law during his bizarre remarks at the United Nations General Assembly.
Younger readers might not be aware of this, but between 2011 and 2015, the threat of “creeping Sharia law” became quite common in far-right circles, before eventually getting picked up by some Republicans eager to score points with the most rabid elements of the GOP base. (Newt Gingrich, for example, included an anti-Sharia provisions in his 2012 presidential platform.)
The basic idea behind this paranoid nonsense was that Americans needed to fear the demise of the separation of church and state, which would give way to the imposition of Islamic rules on the public against Americans’ will. State-sanctioned Sharia law did not and does not exist (at least not in this country), and the idea that government officials would impose Sharia on the populace was obviously silly. But at the time, too many Republicans and their allies took all of this quite seriously, as part of a bizarre campaign to scare people and turn Muslim Americans into a threat in need of government action. All of this, of course, predated Trump’s trip down the golden escalator, which ushered in a new era of Republican politics with a different cast of villains. The fact that this anti-Sharia nonsense is apparently back suggests that the GOP’s existing list of boogeymen isn’t delivering the kind of results the party wants to see, so at least some Republicans are turning back the clock, pointing anew to an old threat that still does not exist.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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