Tim Pawlenty and Sharia

Tim Pawlenty is positioning himself as the "generic Republican" in the 2012 field, but like with Newt Gingrich on climate and Mitt Romney on health care, he seems to have a secret stealth past as someone with some reasonable ideas. For example, Adam Serwer writes about a short-lived Pawlenty initiative to encourage sharia-compliant mortgages in Minnesota to help boost homeownership among the state's relatively large Muslim population:

Pawlenty's effort to increase minority homeownership by encouraging companies to offer Sharia-compliant mortgages was entirely in keeping with his reputation as a "Sam's Club Republican" concerned with helping "regular people." But in the 2012 race, he'll be up against competitors who may try to use it against him.

One of Pawlenty's potential rivals, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, recently said that "Sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution." Fellow potential 2012 rival Newt Gingrich called for a federal ban on Sharia law last year. In 2008, the Thomas More Law Center sued the Treasury Department, charging that the bailout of American International Group violated the establishment clause because AIG was offering its customers Sharia-compliant homeowner's insurance. One of the lawyers litigating that case, David Yerushalmi, is associated with Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, which has long warned that Muslims are seeking to replace the Constitution with Sharia law. Gaffney himself has warned that Sharia-compliant finance is a Muslim Brotherhood plot to facilitate the "penetration of Sharia into Western societies by mainlining it into their capitalist bloodstreams." When Justice Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, National Review columnist Andrew C. McCarthy accused Kagan of attempting "to promote Shariah compliance in the U.S. financial sector," because she set up a program for studying Islamic finance at Harvard. Pawlenty's efforts could draw similar accusations.

Michele Bachmann is popular with Republican voters precisely because she's a genuine kook. Few people have the kind of record of unvarnished nuttiness that the situation really calls for.