Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday announced a plan to defund the salary of the director of the ATF for the agency’s draconian policies toward gun owners and dealers.
Gaetz, of Fort Walton Beach, and Greene, of Georgia, floated the idea at a “field hearing” in Florida.
Monday, Gaetz said that zeroing out the salary of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach was intended to “constrain resources that would otherwise be used to put people out of business and to harm our fellow Americans.”
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“The history of the ATF is fraught with misconduct,” Gaetz added.
The GOP lawmakers also argued the point in a letter sent Monday to House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rep. Kay Granger.
“The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been weaponized against the American people by a radical, anti-Second Amendment Biden Administration,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, which was first obtained and reported on by The Daily Caller.
“The leadership at the ATF has proven unable or unwilling to see that the ATF respect the rule of law and not act where congress has not legislated. Instead, the ATF abuses its rule making authority, legislating through the executive and making a mockery of the separation of powers mandated by the Constitution.”
“The ATF has even made it a matter of official policy to shut down gun stores by making perfection the standard in record keeping – a standard the ATF itself could not meet,”
“Since the Biden Administration has announced its new ‘zero tolerance’ policy in 2021, Federal Firearms Licensees have faced the highest revocation rate in 16 years. This policy has effectively become the death penalty for even the most innocent of clerical errors.”
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“The ATF has shown itself incapable of operating within the confines of its statutory authority, and we must force a change.”
At the hearing hosted by Gaetz, Brandon Herrera, a licensed gun dealer in Texas and North Carolina, said even local ATF field agents are captive to the anti-gun policies of their bosses in Washington.
“The local ATF field agents are usually trying to be helpful,” said Herrera. “The problem starts when you start incorporating the feds in the D.C. offices. That’s where you start having people who have political agendas — and especially with the zero-tolerance rule.”
“There is a penalty for the agents as well,” he added. “If they fail to catch small clerical errors [and] somebody comes back behind them and finds one later that they should have caught. That agent can also lose their career. So now they have pensions on the line.”
Gaetz and Greene intend to invoke the Holman Rule, which allows amendments to spending bills to reduce or eliminate funding to programs already authorized by Congress or to reduce or eliminate the salaries of individual federal employees. Reinstating the rule was part of the Freedom Caucus’ demands in the deal with Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
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