WASHINGTON -- The massacre in Texas cast a pall over confirmation hearings Wednesday for Steven Dettelbach, President Joe Biden's pick to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but it may have improved his chances of being confirmed.
White House officials knew the hearings would be a make-or-break moment for Biden's stalled agenda on gun control. With unanimous Republican opposition expected, they cannot afford a single Democratic defection in an evenly divided Senate.
The dynamic shifted less than 24 hours before Dettelbach appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when an 18-year-old man wielded a semi-automatic rifle to kill 19 schoolchildren, a teacher and another adult at a school in Uvalde.
The shooting raised the stakes of the fast-tracked hearing, bringing into even starker relief the differences between Dettelbach, a mainstream Democrat who supports his party's call for renewal of an assault weapons ban, and Republicans who have portrayed him as a threat to Second Amendment rights.
Republicans, who had been expected to grill him over previous support for a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, adopted a less confrontational tone than they did in their harsh questioning of David Chipman, the administration's first ATF nominee, who was forced to withdraw in the fall for lack of Democratic support.
And in the hours after Dettelbach's testimony, two of the three members of the Democratic caucus who were seen as undecided -- Jon Tester of Montana and Angus King of Maine -- praised his restrained appearance before the committee and suggested they were leaning toward supporting him, according to Democrats.
It is still not clear where the remaining member, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., stands. But White House officials have said they are cautiously optimistic that he will support Dettelbach -- partly because he had backed Chipman, who was a far more polarizing nominee.
Dettelbach, a former federal prosecutor in Ohio, began his testimony before the Judiciary Committee with a somber expression of grief for those killed a day earlier.
"My thoughts are very much with the community in Texas and other communities" that have suffered similar tragedies in the past, he said. News of the shooting Tuesday made him squeeze his children a "little harder," he added, as his family sat behind him.
The most pointed exchange came when Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. a supporter of gun rights, questioned Dettelbach over his support of an assault weapons ban, a position Dettelbach promoted during an unsuccessful campaign for Ohio attorney general in 2018.
"How would you define an assault rifle?" Cotton asked, repeating a line of inquiry that tripped up Chipman during his hearing.
Rather than directly answering the question, Dettelbach first deferred to Congress and state legislatures; pressed on the topic, he offered a lengthy explanation of why he believed that defining an assault weapon was "difficult," consuming much of Cotton's allotted time.
The two major policy changes Biden espoused during the 2020 campaign -- reviving an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and imposing universal background checks on gun buyers -- have been blocked by Senate Republicans.
"I've been talking to a number of Democrats who say how favorably impressed they have been with him, how favorably toward him they feel, but they want to watch the hearings just to make sure," said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a friend of Dettelbach's who has been working colleagues on his behalf.
"I'm pretty certain we're going to confirm him," he added.
BACKGROUND CHECKS REVIVED
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer swiftly set in motion a pair of background-check bills for gun buyers Wednesday in response to the school massacre in Texas. But the Democrat acknowledged Congress' unyielding rejection of previous legislation to curb the national epidemic of gun violence.
Schumer implored his Republican colleagues to cast aside the powerful gun lobby and reach across the aisle for even a modest compromise bill. But no votes are being scheduled.
"Please, please, please, d*** it -- put yourselves in the shoes of these parents just for once," Schumer said as he opened the Senate.
He said: "If the slaughter of schoolchildren can't convince Republicans to buck the NRA, what can we do?"
In many ways, the end of any gun violence legislation in Congress was signaled a decade ago when the Senate failed to approve a firearms background check bill after 20 children, mostly 6- and 7-year-olds, were killed when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Despite the outpouring of grief Wednesday after the starkly similar Texas massacre, it's not at all clear there will be any different outcome.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called it a "put-up or shut-up moment."
While President Joe Biden said "we have to act," substantial gun violence legislation has been blocked routinely by Republicans, often with a handful of conservative Democrats.
"Where's the backbone, where's the courage to stand up to a very powerful lobby?" Biden said Wednesday, speaking at the White House before signing an executive order on policing.
Despite mounting mass shootings in communities nationwide -- two in the past two weeks alone, including Tuesday in Texas and the racist killing of black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket 10 days earlier -- lawmakers have been unwilling to set aside their differences and abandon the gun lobby to work out any compromise.
Even the targeting of their own failed to move Congress to act. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot in the head at an event outside a Tucson grocery store in 2011, and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., was severely injured when a gunman opened fire on a Republican congressional baseball team practice in 2017.
Republicans quickly pushed forward a bill championed by Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin that would create a nationwide database of school safety practices. But Schumer objected to its immediate consideration, vowing a much broader debate and votes.
Pleading with his colleagues for a compromise, Murphy said he was reaching out to almost a dozen Republicans, including the two Texas senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and had called Sen. Manchin, who co-authored the bill that failed after Sandy Hook.
"When you have babies, little children, innocent as can be, oh God," Manchin told reporters, noting he had three school-age grandchildren. "It just makes no sense at all why we can't do common sense -- common sense things -- and try to prevent some of this from happening."
Information for this article was contributed by Glenn Thrush of The New York Times and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press.