With just a month — and three voting days — to go before the book closes on the General Assembly’s current 2-year-long legislative session, state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-12th, and his State Government Committee are wasting valuable time.

Instead of using the home stretch of this session to address real issues, on Tuesday the committee advanced a senseless bill seeking to ban Islamic law and other foreign laws from Pennsylvania courtrooms.

What a waste of time. In the absence of any substantive threat — legal or otherwise — to the rights of Americans engaged with the court system, we can only call this bill what it is: political hysteria and bigotry given form and focus.

Mr. Metcalfe and other lawmakers caught up in deploying this dog whistle for Islamaphobia try to argue against this characterization by claiming the legislation, American Laws for American Courts, targets any “foreign legal code.”

Those arguments also ultimately betray their true purpose and focus. In a release trumpeting advancement of the ALAC bill, Metcalfe couldn’t resist singling out Islamic laws and customs — commonly referred to as Sharia — at length and labeling them “unjust and barbaric.”

“Other foreign laws,” — tacked on after Sharia is singled out and made the focus — is an ineffective attempt at political correctness that only makes their “wink-wink, nod-nod” ploy more obvious.

Sharia is not a threat to the freedoms — of speech, to assemble, to fair and impartial trial, and of religious observance — that form the bedrock of this country. In fact, the right of Muslim-Americans to observe Sharia is just as protected under our Constitution as the right of Christian Americans to observe the doctrine of Christ’s divinity, or Jewish Americans to observe God’s revelations to Moses at Mount Sinai.

And, just like each of those religious codes, it is already prohibited from being observed in our courts by the establishment clause of the United States Constitution: “This Constitution ... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby.” (Article VI, Clause 2).

That should be all that needs to be said on the matter. But Mr. Metcalfe and other opportunists — who any other time claim to be scions of these constitutional rights — have chosen to try and misinform and divide Pennsylvanians with these useless pieces of legislation.

Members of the House’s State Government Committee — of which Metcalfe is the majority chairman — should stop wasting their time and our tax dollars pandering to alarmist and discriminatory sentiments, and try to do something useful before the current legislative session ends on Nov. 30.