The Boehner

‘In the months ahead, after all, people are going to be charting the dollar and watching where it stands, not only against other currencies but also against gold. Between now and 2008, we will be in a period in which, if the dollar begins to fall, the blame is not going to attach to the Republicans, who will no longer control the Congress, but to Democrats. If the dollar goes down further from here, it might as well be renamed the Pelosi. Going into a transitional election with a falling dollar is not something the Democrats will want to do.’

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Those were the words with which, almost exactly four years ago, we greeted the Democrats’ accession to the leadership of the Congress. Now, as control of the House is returned to the Republicans, it is the point that we predict will prove most pressing for Speaker Boehner. For it is to the Congress — in contradistinction to the president and the courts — that the Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, delegates the power to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standard of weights and measures. On Mrs. Pelosi’s watch, the value of the dollar made an astonishing plunge, collapsing to less than half of the 637th of an ounce of gold it was worth when Mrs. Pelosi’s Democrats were given their mandate.

That is history now, and in a matter of weeks we might as well start referring to the greenback as the Boehner. Monetary policy will be by no means the only element of the Congress’s responsibility in respect of the economy. There will be fiscal matters, for surely the election was nothing if not a rejection of the Democrats’ intention to allow the largest tax increase in the history of the country to go into effect as the country is struggling to pull out of what will come to be known — depending on what the next Congress does — as either the Great Recession or the Obama Recession. But no question will confront the next speaker more urgently than the dollar.

Indeed, the votes were still being cast in what became the Republican landslide in the House when the Bloomberg news wire issued a story yesterday suggesting that the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, would be facing more scrutiny from Congress after the Republican election gains. It noted the likely accession to the Senate of Rand Paul, who would, the wire noted, join Senator DeMint, as an advocate for what Bloomberg characterized as “Tea Party candidates who backed an unsuccessful bill to subject the Fed’s monetary policy to congressional audits.” Rand Paul is now senator elect.

Bloomberg noted that Darrell Issa, now set to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, “has the Fed in his sights” and quoted Mr. Issa as having declared in an interview last month that Congress must “look in- depth behind the curtain, rather than simply have the Fed chairman come up and lecture us.” The wire service quoted the man who is now the new senator from Kentucky as having said in July, “It wasn’t that the home builder was stupid, or the mortgage broker was stupid. It was that they got the wrong signal from the monetary policy of the government.”

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If the Republican accession to leadership in the House really means that the cause of monetary reform is stirring — and that’s how it looks to us — this couldn’t be better news. The world waits for a leader who gives evidence that he understands the monetary powers and disabilities established in our system. What is being called a dollar today is so far from the constitutional dollar envisioned by the Founders of America that it is going to be hard to work back to honest money. Hard, but not impossible, and this is one of the things these columns will be watching in the new congress. There are those — Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, say, and, most famously, Congressman Ron Paul — who have been pressing the Federal Reserve in respect of gold. The issue went right past the Democrats. They led the congress for four years with nary a how-do-you-do to the crisis of the dollar. Now is the chance for the Republicans to seize the day and establish sound and constitutional money as a principle that goes with Republican leadership.