The acting attorney general of the United States is a crackpot.

Matthew G. Whitaker, installed in the job by President Trump to replace Jeff Sessions, was asked in 2014, during an ill-fated run in the Republican senatorial primary in Iowa, about the worst decisions in the Supreme Court’s history. Whitaker’s answer, to an Iowa blog called Caffeinated Thoughts, was chilling.

“There are so many,” he replied. “I would start with the idea of Marbury v. Madison. That’s probably a good place to start and the way it’s looked at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional issues. We’ll move forward from there. All New Deal cases that were expansive of the federal government. Those would be bad. Then all the way up to the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate.”

Reasonable people can differ over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Maybe there’s some space to debate the New Deal-era cases that cemented the authority of the regulatory state. But Marbury? This is lunacy. For any lawyer — certainly for one now at the helm of the Justice Department — to disagree with Marbury is like a physicist denouncing the laws of gravity.

Marbury was wrong. Religious tests for judges. If you thought the big worry about Whitaker was how he would handle special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, that might be just the beginning.

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Trump's replacement for fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, thinks that if you're not Christian, you shouldn't be a federal judge. Judges should be "people of faith" and need to have a “biblical view of justice," and Whitaker would like to see a person's "world view," because if they have a secular world view, he'd be "very concerned with how they judge."

Whitaker revealed his ignorance with these remarks during a 2014 conservative forum while vying for the Republican US Senate nomination in Iowa.

The takeaway from this: According to the acting Attorney General of the United States, if you're open-minded, don't be a judge.