ASSOCIATED PRESS Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has confirmed a string of right-wing ideologues to be lifetime federal judges, is drawing the line on confirming a lawyer who defended his client.

WASHINGTON ― Senate Republicans are finally standing up to President Donald Trump on the kind of judicial nominee they can’t support: a lawyer who defends his client.

Michael Bogren, Trump’s nominee to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, announced in a scathing Wednesday statement that he’s withdrawing his name because his nomination is already toast, thanks to “gross mischaracterizations” about his legal work by some GOP senators.

“I have been accused of being anti-religious, anti-Catholic, and a religious bigot,” fumed Borgen. “It is truly unfortunate that what used to be a dignified process has sunk to this level.”

Three Republicans on the Judiciary Committee ― Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Ted Cruz (Texas) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) ― were prepared to reject Bogren’s nomination because they didn’t like the way he once defended the city of East Lansing in a lawsuit involving a Catholic couple. The couple sued after being barred from a farmer’s market after they refused to a host a same-sex marriage on their farm, citing religious beliefs. In his legal defense of the city, Bogren, a managing partner at the law firm Plunkett Cooney, used analogies involving the Ku Klux Klan and imams who do not believe women should drive.

That argument is anti-Catholic bigotry and unacceptable, argued Hawley, who laid into Bogren in his May confirmation hearing.

“You compared in your brief a Catholic family’s adherence to the teachings of their church to the activities of the KKK and the teachings of radical imams,” Hawley said. “Do you stand by those statements?”

“Respectfully, that is not what I said and those are not my views,” Bogren replied, as Hawley repeatedly interrupted him. “The point I was trying to make was that religious beliefs trying to justify discrimination if extended to sexual orientation, which the city of East Lansing protects, could be used to try to justify any other sort of discrimination, whether it be gender or race.”

“You think that the Catholic family’s pointing to the teachings of their church is equivalent to a KKK member invoking Christianity?” pressed Hawley.

“From a legal perspective,” Bogren said, again talking through the senator’s interruptions, “there is no distinction.”