Senate confirms a new ATF director who, the same day, signs thirty-four gun-rule changes.

Hon. The Senate, on a 59-39 vote, confirmed Robert Cekada to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Seven Democrats joined the Republicans. He is the first ATF director confirmed after a Republican nomination, in the agency’s whole modern history. That is its own story, and it is a story.

The story he made on his own, however, was the part where he walked from the Senate floor to a Justice Department lectern, alongside the Acting Attorney General, and signed thirty-four notices of final and proposed rulemaking. Thirty-four. In one go. Before, by all accounts, his desk was set up.

I have been a waitress for thirty years. I have seen a new manager walk into a diner and, on day one, before he has shaken everybody’s hand, change the menu, the uniforms, the music, the tip pool, the cleaning schedule, and the lock on the bathroom door. I have seen that manager last about a month. The diners notice. The cooks notice. The bus tubs notice. The customers notice and they go to the diner across the street.

The ATF, hon, is not a diner. The ATF is a regulatory agency that, on its books, runs the federal government’s gun-rule rulemaking process. Thirty-four rulemaking actions, on the same Wednesday, is not a personnel change. Thirty-four rulemaking actions, on the same Wednesday, is a backlog that was, on prior form, sitting in the deputy’s drawer for two years, waiting for confirmed leadership to put a signature on it.

The bipartisan margin on the confirmation, on the merits, says something. Seven Senate Democrats decided that an agency without a confirmed director was worse than an agency with a director they didn’t agree with on every regulation. That is, in the modern Senate, a quietly mature judgment. The thirty-four-rule package, however, is a different judgment. The package was, by all available evidence, prepared by the prior administration’s regulatory drafters and held until the new director’s pen could be on it. The pen, on Wednesday, was on it. By Thursday, the package was final.

You can argue with each of the thirty-four rules. You can argue that some of them are good and some of them are not. You can’t argue that the federal government, on a Wednesday, in the same hour, swore in a director and changed the rule book.

That ought to concern you.