The Senate decided that the ATF does not need a director such as David Chipman, an ideologue and an activist. The Senate is right.
What does the ATF need? I wrote about this earlier in the summer:
The federal role in the firearms trade, properly understood, is not trivial but limited. The federal government has a legitimate role to play in the import and export of firearms, in interstate commerce in firearms and ammunition, and, perhaps most important, in policing and prosecuting interstate criminal enterprises involved in the illegal trafficking of firearms. With the exception of that last issue, the ATF’s business should be almost exclusively a matter of ensuring, for health-and-safety purposes, that commercially available firearms and ammunition subject to ATF jurisdiction meet minimum quality standards, that ammunition is manufactured to the proper technical specification, etc.
The agency should not be policing the design of firearms based on assumptions about the behavior of gun owners. To the extent that that is legitimate, it is a statutory matter rather than a regulatory one. The issue for the ATF should be whether the product functions as it is designed to, not whether the ATF approves or disapproves of that design on political grounds.
It is an important job. I nominate Charles C. W. Cooke.