 | | David Chipman during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.Al Drago for The New York Times |
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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been without a director for 13 of the last 15 years. |
That's because 2006 was the year when Congress passed a law, pushed by gun rights advocates, requiring the agency's director to be confirmed by a majority in the Senate. Since then, only the Obama administration has successfully confirmed an A.T.F. director: It did so in dramatic fashion in 2013, with one Democratic senator flying in overnight to help overcome a filibuster. |
President Biden is trying to become the second president since 2006 to fill the position. |
And his nominee to run the agency, David Chipman, a two-decade A.T.F. veteran, stands a good chance: The Democrats' two most consistently centrist senators, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, have signaled they're likely to support his nomination — and that may well be enough to get him confirmed, even if Republicans are united in opposition, as the filibuster is no longer an option on presidential appointees. |
It would be a boon to a growing Democratic movement advocating more effective gun safety regulation — and a blow to the National Rifle Association, which has consistently sought to kneecap the A.T.F. |
Keeping the director position vacant has been "a pretty effective strategy," said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, and the author of five books on gun policy. |
While there is always an interim or acting director, "agencies have directors for a reason," he said. "You want a person at the top of the chart to advocate for the agency, be its public face, have the prestige of the office, be able to negotiate with members of Congress and the executive branch." |
He said the N.R.A. and its Republican allies had also succeeded in passing a number of amendments, often quietly, that prevented the agency from keeping close track of guns and enforcing even the limited gun-control laws that exist. They've accomplished this mostly by keeping the agency's "appropriations low, limiting their power, preventing them from computerizing their records," he said. |
The N.R.A. — though badly hobbled by its own legal issues — has mounted a $2 million advertising campaign against Chipman's nomination. A group of 20 Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Chipman's nomination and called his views "hostile to our rights and way of life." |
Chipman faced tough questioning today from highly skeptical Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, who pressed him for specifics on his support for an assault weapons ban and for universal background checks. |
"People are very concerned about your stance on the Second Amendment, and are very concerned that you would be going after law-abiding gun owners," Senator Marsha Blackburn said. |
Thanks largely to lobbying from the N.R.A., Congress has passed a number of laws in recent years placing limits on the A.T.F.'s ability to enforce laws around tracking and tracing firearms. The so-called Tiahrt Amendment, enacted in 2003, prevents the bureau from sharing information from its gun-tracing database with anyone other than law enforcement agents actively investigating a crime. |
In one of the most glaring examples of legislative undermining, the agency has been barred from upgrading its data-collection systems from paper to digital. |
"The fact that the A.T.F.'s record-keeping is still based on paper records is a sign of how effective the N.R.A. has been at hobbling the A.T.F.," Adam Winkler, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America," said in an interview, adding that police forces around the country had had access to cutting-edge technology for decades. |
Kristin Anne Goss, a Duke University political scientist and gun policy expert, said that even as the influence of the N.R.A. had waned, Republican lawmakers had grown only more united in their opposition to enforcement of gun control. |
But she added that as pro-regulation groups like Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety had become a more potent force in Democratic politics, they had turned more attention to empowering the A.T.F. |
"Historically, the A.T.F. was sort of hung out to dry," Goss said. "It didn't really have any outside backers or interest groups that were taking up its cause. And that has really changed in the last five or 10 years." |
The politics of gun control have indeed become more partisan, a fact that would be borne out in the case of a party-line vote on Chipman's nomination. Twenty years ago, about three in five Democrats favored making gun laws more strict, and close to half of Republicans agreed, according to Gallup polling. By last fall, the share of Democrats supporting stricter gun laws had risen to 85 percent, while support among Republicans was down to just 22 percent. |
Spitzer said that if Chipman were confirmed, he could be in a position to add to the pressure already being exerted by Everytown, Giffords and their allies on Capitol Hill, particularly Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. |
"He might be able to effectively go to Congress and say, 'We're 35 years behind the times — there's no reason why we shouldn't be computerized.' It's pretty hard to argue in a public way that the A.T.F. should have all paper records," Spitzer said. |
"The N.R.A. does best when it's operating in a low-key, behind-committee-doors manner," he added. "If you bring things into the light, it makes it a more prominent issue and helps someone like Chipman make the case for the importance of an agency like the A.T.F." |
Biden calls for U.S. intelligence agencies to 'redouble' investigative efforts into the origins of the coronavirus. |
By Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Benjamin Mueller |
President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies today to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, indicating publicly that his administration takes seriously the possibility that the virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, as well as the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans. |
In a statement, Biden made it clear that the intelligence agencies had not reached a consensus on how the virus, which sparked a pandemic and has killed almost 600,000 people in the United States, originated. But he directed them to "redouble their efforts" and report back to him in 90 days. |
Biden's statement, his most public and expansive yet on the uncertainty around how the virus spread to humans, came as top health officials renewed their appeals this week for a more rigorous investigation and an earlier report by an international team of experts faced mounting criticism for dismissing the possibility that it had accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory. |
Just in the past several days, the White House had downplayed the need for an investigation led by the United States and insisted that the World Health Organization was the proper place for an international inquiry. Biden's statement on Wednesday was an abrupt shift, though officials declined to be specific about what had changed. |
"What has changed is, he wants to give another 90 days to dig a little deeper, to double down — the I.C. to double down their efforts," said Karine Jean-Pierre, the deputy White House press secretary, referring to the intelligence community. "The W.H.O. doing their thing and the I.C., doing what they're doing currently is not mutually exclusive." |
But Biden's comments suggested that his own government's review of the evidence made it that much more urgent for American investigators to take the lead. In his statement, the president said that he had asked his national security adviser in March to task intelligence officials with a report on their latest analysis of the virus's origins, which he said he received earlier this month before asking for "additional follow-up." He said the intelligence community had "coalesced around two likely scenarios" but had not definitively answered the question. |
"Here is their current position: 'While two elements in the I.C. leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter — each with low or moderate confidence — the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,'" Biden said. |
The Argument: Bipartisanship is dead. Long live bipartisanship. |
The clock is ticking for President Biden. He has a choice to make: compromise with Republicans, as he has emphasized he wants to do, or bypass them to push his agenda through with fellow Democrats. |
On today's episode of "The Argument," Jane Coaston was joined by two people who disagree on whether Biden's push for bipartisanship is the right move. Jason Grumet is the founder and president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, and Aaron Belkin is the director of Take Back the Court, which calls for expanding the Supreme Court. |
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