News that Senator Rand Paul is threatening to block the promotion of Vice Chairman Yellen to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve holds the promise of one of his patented filibusters. It is not our purpose here to oppose the elevation of Mrs. Yellen to the top job at the nation’s central bank. Our view is that the monetary problem is much deeper than which Keynesian leads the system. If there is a chance through the use of parliamentary maneuvering within the Senate to put the issue of monetary reform before the American people, however, let us just say we’re all for it.

That is, we favor Mr. Paul using every device that the long traditions of the Senate make available. What he wants, according to the Huffington Post quoting CNBC, is a vote on his Federal Reserve Transparency Act. The New York Sun was, so far as we are aware, the first newspaper to endorse this measure, which would require a full audit of the Fed of the kind for which Congressman Ron Paul, who is the senator’s father and is now retired, started agitating years ago. The way the Huffington Post puts it is that the bill would “eliminate current audit restrictions placed on the Government Accountability Office and require the Fed to undergo a complete audit by a specific deadline.”

An audit of the Fed of the kind for which the Pauls are asking is long overdue. It would involve not just an accounting of the institution’s balance sheet and gold holdings but also an examination of how the Federal Reserve System operates, of its foreign entanglements, and of its monetary philosophy. The Fed’s most private records and correspondence, one can imagine, would have to be opened to auditors, along with its un-redacted minutes. It strikes us that this is not too much to ask of the Senate as the Fed commences its second century.

The House, after all, has already spoken. It took a while. Congressman Paul started agitating for an audit of the Fed years ago. At first it seemed like a marginal quest. Then an audit measure was moved that wasn’t the real deal. Dr. Paul actually opposed it. Then, in July of last year, the house passed an Audit the Fed Bill backed by Ron Paul and did so by an overwhelming bipartisan vote, 327 to 98. Reuters quoted Chairman Bernanke as calling it a “nightmare scenario.”

Reuters, however, said the vote “showed bipartisan support in the House for greater scrutiny of the U.S. central bank’s powers.” Failure of the measure in the Senate can be laid at the feet of the majority leader, Senator Reid, who supposedly once supported an audit but changed his mind, throwing into sharp relief the question of what are the Democrats so all-fired afraid. Since then the logic of an audit, of transparency, has become only more and more clear.

This is particularly true in light of the failure of the Congress to enact the kind of centennial review of the Federal Reserve Act that has been sought by the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, Kevin Brady of Texas. We are just at a junction at which it is time to look at the Fed, which Congress established a century ago on one over-riding condition — that nothing in the Federal Reserve Act would be construed as abandoning the convertibility of the dollar into gold.

At the time the value of a dollar was approximately a 20th of an ounce of gold. Today it’s not worth a 67th of that, and the Drudge Report is headlining an editorial in the London Financial Times about how America is a superpower “at risk of slippage” and how in respect of the dollar “underlying confidence is shaken.” All of which is to say, it’s hard to imagine a more timely moment for Senator Paul to go to the mat for his Federal Reserve Transparency Act. If Vice Chairman Yellen turns out to be against a such an audit, the first question the Senate can ask her is what is she trying to hide.