President Nixon said: “I’m not a crook.” President-to-be George H.W. Bush said: “Read my lips. No new taxes.” President Clinton said: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Chairman Bernanke of the Fed said: “We could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if we have to.” And Janet Yellen? It looks like she’s going to go down in history as the Federal Reserve chairman who said: “The Federal Reserve is not a partisan political organization.”

Mrs. Yellen’s boast moved over the Bloomberg wire this week after the news service reported that before Lael Brainard joined the Federal Reserve as a member of the board of governors, she had given $750 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Then, as Bloomberg’s story goes on to note, “a wider review of campaign giving revealed that 79 percent of federal-level contributions from Fed staffers since November 2004 had gone to Democrats.”

Duh? Of course the Federal Reserve is a partisan political organization. It mightn’t have incorporated ties to a political party, Democratic or Republican. And it certainly seeks to pay verbal fealty to the fiction that it is supposed to be independent and above (or below) the fray. That idea — its apolitical nature — is not only a fiction. It is almost an unconstitutional idea. It is completely askew of how the Founders of America intended the monetary powers to be exercised.

These powers are granted in the Constitution to — and only to — the Congress. None of the other branches gets any monetary powers. The president doesn’t have any monetary powers. The courts lack monetary powers. The states are so restricted in their monetary powers — they are prohibited from coining money and may make nothing but gold and silver coins legal tender — that they are left almost no room to make trouble. It’s only Congress that holds the monetary powers.

It holds the power to tax, to spend, to borrow money on the credit of the United States, to coin money and regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standard of weights and measures. It also holds the power to regulate commerce not only among the several states but also with the Indian tribes and with foreign nations. Those are the monetary powers. And they are given to the branch of the government that is, by dint of the House and Senate, the most political institution of all.

Partisanship, moreover, is one of those determinations that is made by him or her whose eyes behold it. Whether Mrs. Yellen perceives the Fed as non-partisan doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s the Congress that decides whether it is being partisan. Mrs. Yellen and her predecessor, Mr. Bernanke, have had a more vexed relationship with Congress than any Fed chairmen we can remember. To plumb the level of distrust one would have to go back to the Bank War.

That was the “war” — a political contest, in actuality — between America and the Second Bank of the United States, a precursor of sorts to the Federal Reserve. It proved, among other things, how dangerous it is for a central bank to start playing politics. That is, though, precisely what the Federal Reserve is doing when it so baldly allies itself with the Democrats in Congress who are opposing Audit the Fed, the Centennial Monetary Commission, and the Sound Dollar Act.

All those are constituents of the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, which is now before the Senate. It was passed by the House within days of Paul Ryan acceding to Speaker. It is an error of judgment for Mrs. Yellen and the Federal Reserve more generally to take a partisan position in this fight. The Federal Reserve was created by Congress and can be uncreated by Congress, which holds the only constitutional grant of the monetary powers in the first place.

Bloomberg paraphrases Mrs. Yellen as saying that “legal political campaign donations from central bank employees, including those of senior Fed officials, do not undermine its standing as a non-partisan agency.” It quotes her as insisting: “We are a non-partisan, independent institution devoted to pursuing our congressionally mandated objectives. I have never seen political views in any way influence the policy judgments that are made inside the Federal Reserve.” Maybe it’s just hard to see from the inside looking out.