When news broke that the Department of Defense had earmarked thousands of web pages for deletion, including the page about then-Col. Paul Tibbets’ B-29 Bomber, the Enola Gay, it seemed too stupid for words. Perhaps the Muskrats were too young to know why the superfortress was historically important. Perhaps their adoration of algos that picked up the word “gay,” newly forbidden in the war against DEI, led them to act without grasping that it was the name of a person rather than a term of sexuality. Either way, it was laughably idiotic. And yet, here they were, deleting 26,000 pages with the Enola Gay being one of them.

But that was dumb kids with an algo where a brain should be. It pales in comparison to the current interim, and pending nominee, for United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin.

On Monday, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent the dean of Georgetown University Law Center, a Catholic law school, a letter that said, “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote D.E.I. This is unacceptable.”

Martin had no background as a prosecutor. Not even a little bit. He did, however, have background as an advocate for the January 6th insurrectionists and cop beaters, which was reason enough in MAGA world for him to get the US Attorney gig, where competence holds no water in comparison to loyalty to the King.

Martin said that he’d begun an “inquiry” into the school and demanded to know whether it had eliminated all D.E.I. — which he does not define, but in right-wing circles tends to refer to any action at all designed to increase diversity or honor historically marginalized people — from the school and its curriculum. He also asked, “If D.E.I. is found in your courses or teaching in any way, will you move swiftly to remove it?”

A United States Attorney holds a lot of power to make people’s lives miserable. They can cause criminal investigations and prosecutions to happen, and even if meritless, compel people to lawyer up and defend, maybe even spend a night or 1000 in the pokey awaiting a PRB. But what they can’t do, at least lawfully, is stick their nose into the curriculum of a private university like Georgetown University Law Center.

The point is not whether you think GULC deserved Martin’s interest or inquiry. Many see Georgetown’s handling of Ilya Shapiro’s ill-conceived twit about Biden’s nomination of now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, where he first limited his scope to black women before selecting a judge whose experience and competence made her a worthy nominee and, as it happens, she was a black woman, as worthy of condemnation. The point is that the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia has no business sticking his MAGA nose into it no matter how emboldened he is about being DEI hunter extraordinaire.

This short letter, which was addressed to William Treanor, the dean of the law school, continued with the declaration that “no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize D.E.I. will be considered.”

To be clear, the idea that the government will condition hiring based on applicants going to schools whose curriculums are MAGA-safe is what First Amendment lawyers call viewpoint discrimination. It’s frowned upon. It’s also unlawful, not that Ed Martin would know much about such things. Dean Treanor sent a letter back to Martin that was less than cooperative.

Your letter challenges Georgetown’s ability to define our mission as an educational institution. It inquires about Georgetown Law’s curriculum and classroom teaching, asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of the curriculum, and asserts that your office will not hire individuals from schools where you find the curriculum “unacceptable.” The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.

Hey, he’s a law dean and couldn’t possibly say in a few words when there are so many words available. My response would have been a bit shorter, perhaps even borrowing from the Cleveland Browns, but then that’s why I’m not the dean of a Catholic university’s law school.

Beyond the legal reality that the government, no matter how passionate it may be about whatever ideology it promotes at any given moment, has no say in what Georgetown chooses to teach, it is shockingly moronic that Ed Martin, still interim US Attorney as the Senate has yet to confirm him, believes it’s part of his job to make an inquiry as if he’s a congressional committee investigating some loathsome practice. The job is to prosecute federal criminals, not to be the wandering inquisitor of DEI, no matter how big a smile it brings to Trump’s jowls.