The Reload reports that Steve Dettelbach, President Joe Biden’s new nominee to run the ATF, has claimed — 19 times — that the 2018 election attorney-general race, in which he lost to David Yost by nearly 190,000 votes, was “rigged.” There is no evidence of any illegal manipulation or stolen votes. And, as we all know, the contention, even the insinuation, that an election was stolen is a broadside against our sacred democratic institutions and disqualifies a person from decent company — with exceptions made for Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, a raft of CNN and MSNBC staff and guests, Washington Post columnists, the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York magazine, and so on and so forth.
(Though I feel compelled to say that perhaps even more disqualifying is Dettelbach’s 2016 salute to the great Muhammad Ali, in which he claimed that “we need to acknowledge that Donald Trump wouldn’t even allow him to come into America.” Kentucky, the birthplace of Cassius Clay, is not only in the United States, it also borders Ohio. But that’s another story.)
In general, Biden seems far more interested in ginning up Republican “obstructionism” narratives and appeasing activist groups than in forwarding competent and appropriate nominees to the Senate. When it comes to the ATF, Biden pulled David Chipman’s nomination, not because of Mitch McConnell, but because Democrats like Joe Manchin and Jon Tester, and reliable liberal vote Angus King, publicly opposed him. The ATF has a legitimate role in enforcing existing laws and regulations. It’s not a place to install partisan operatives to rant about “universal” background checks, banning semi-automatic rifles, and “ghost guns,” the newest obsession of the anti-gun crowd. That’s for elected officials to do. Nominees like Chipman, and to a lesser extent, Dettelbach, have shown contempt for law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment, which only makes the agency’s job harder, no matter how beneficial such nominations might be in placating David Hogg.