Chances are, most Americans have not heard of Steven Dettelbach, but for those concerned about enforcing the nation’s gun laws, his ATF confirmation vote yesterday was an important breakthrough. NBC News reported:
The Senate voted 48-46 on Tuesday to confirm Steven Dettelbach to be the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, making him the first permanent leader of the agency since 2015. Dettelbach, who was a U.S. attorney in Ohio during the Obama administration, will lead a law enforcement agency tasked with overseeing firearms in the wake of numerous high-profile mass shootings and a new federal gun violence prevention law.
During the confirmation process, Dettelbach received overwhelming support from law enforcement leaders, former ATF leaders, police organizations, and several dozen former federal prosecutors — including some from Republican administrations.
And yet, 96 percent of Senate Republicans voted against him anyway.
This was not a situation in which GOP lawmakers raised concerns about Dettelbach’s qualifications; this was a political dynamic in which nearly all Senate Republicans effectively said they’d oppose anyone nominated to lead the ATF, regardless of qualifications.
As we discussed in the spring, since the ATF director position became a Senate-confirmed job 16 years ago, the Senate has confirmed a grand total of one person to the post. (Before yesterday, B. Todd Jones, a former federal prosecutor tapped for the job by Barack Obama, was the only Senate-confirmed ATF director ever — and he just barely passed Senate muster in 2015.)
Senate Republicans didn’t even confirm Donald Trump’s nominee to lead ATF — and GOP senators generally saw themselves as little more than rubber stamps for whatever Trump wanted.
The trouble, of course, is that Republicans feared Trump’s nominee might enforce the nation’s gun laws, and the party wasn’t prepared to let that happen. Indeed, practically every GOP senator for a decade and a half has opposed every nominee to lead the agency.
They could not, however, derail Dettelbach’s nomination.
As for why you should care, having a rare, confirmed ATF director is likely to make a substantive difference. As The New Republic’s Daniel Strauss wrote ahead of yesterday’s vote, “the agency will finally be run by someone with full authority (and bipartisan blessing) to do things like distribute the agency’s resources to its inspection officers or tracing tools for tracking guns found at crime scenes. With Biden’s proposed budgetary increase to the agency, a Director Dettelbach could use those funds to focus more on gun dealers who are breaking the law. Nothing of what Dettelbach or any ATF director could do concerns taking guns away from lawful owners, as the gun lobby likes to allege. It just involves stopping lawbreakers with guns, something that is sorely needed right now.”
Last year, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, the chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said in reference to an ATF nominee, “The first thing you’ve got to do is stop the guy that’s going to enforce the laws.”
Yesterday, most GOP senators went along with this approach, but President Joe Biden’s nominee was confirmed anyway.