But regardless, there's a harsh reality that has to be remembered about the ATF, especially regarding the Constitution.

I bet you can already see the problem.

David Codrea sure does. In a piece titled, "ATF Director Under Trump Will Still Be Directing Unconstitutional Agency," he notes:

“A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts,” The New York Times reported ruefully in mid-December. “President-elect Donald J. Trump is almost certain to choose a gun-rights advocate as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or to simply leave the job vacant.” The post has been vacant before, lots of times. Per NPR at the time of his nomination hearing, “If confirmed, [current Director Steve] Dettelbach would be the first permanent director of ATF in seven years. The position often faces pushback from gun rights groups and has only had one Senate-confirmed director in the past 16 years.” That was B. Todd Jones who took over after Acting Director Ken Melson had presided over an agency embroiled in the Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scandal. In the time since Jones left in 2015 for a better paying gig with the NFL, four acting heads filled the chair until Dettelbach won out after the Biden administration’s initial pick, ATF Agent and zealous Giffords flack David Chipman, was rejected by the Senate after loud and sustained gun rights and industry objections.

There was one other prominent failure to launch before Dettelbach, during Donald Trump’s first term. In 2019, he nominated Kenneth Charles Canterbury, Jr., past president of the Fraternal Order of Police who, despite the promise that, “I take a back seat to no one in my reverence for the Second Amendment” and gushing praise from then NRA-ILA head Chris Cox, turns out to be an unacceptable pick who had supported Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, Eric Holder for Attorney General, and presided over an FOP that opposed national concealed carry reciprocity. “Those said to be under consideration are: Blake Masters, a far-right conservative in Arizona who is close to the financier Peter Thiel and who mounted a failed bid for a House seat; Peter J. Forcelli, a former bureau official who wrote a book on the “Fast and Furious” scandal; Larry Keane, the head of the gun manufacturers’ trade association; and several current and former top A.T.F. officials, including Robert Cekada, Daniel Board and Rick Dressler,” the NYT article says.

Let’s look at the top names, Masters, Forcelli, and Keane, and see what clues their pasts can point us toward what we could expect.

Codrea doesn't get too far into the weeds about the constitutionality of the ATF in the piece, though he does discuss some of the people who have been suggested, glossing over Brandon Herrera pretty quickly, and not entirely without cause.

However, I'm going to.

Part of why I like Herrera as a pick is that he promised to gut the ATF to such a degree that the bureau wouldn't recover for generations, and if we can't dismantle it entirely, then we should strip it down to little more than a revenue collection agency, which is what it originally was.

Federal law enforcement doesn't have the best history when it comes to respecting civil liberties. The FBI has conducted illegal wiretaps, for example. 

However, those are overreaches that happen generally outside of what those agencies are intended to do. It's wrong and they get slapped down for it, at least in theory, when they're caught.

The ATF, on the other hand, exists at least in part to regulate a basic constitutional right. 

As such, the ATF is inherently unconstitutional since the right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed." If infringement is unconstitutional, which it is, then so is any law enforcement agency that exists to enforce those infringements.

It doesn't matter who Trump picks to head the agency in part because the next Democrat will simply direct whoever runs it under them to ramp up those infringements, as we've seen all too often over the last four years. So long as the ATF exists, it's a threat to our rights. That's not going to change during the Trump administration without a formal appeal and a law that prohibits whoever takes over that role from actually, you know, taking over the rest of what many think of as that role.