Not since 1896 — when William Jennings Bryan ran for president on a platform of the free coinage of silver — has America seen quite the kind of battle over inflation that is shaping up in the Congress. This became evident last week, at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on what is becoming an alarming issue: the governance of the regional Federal Reserve Banks and how it could impact policy.

This is moving to the fore in Congress as the country comes to the realization that the scant economic growth we’ve seen during the Obama years (less than 2% on average) has been purchased by the government racking up on President Obama’s watch more federal debt than all 43 previous American presidents combined. The Democrats and their leftist allies are plotting in Congress for America to inflate its way out of these obligations.

It is amazing that this hasn’t yet hit the presidential campaign. Ben Bernanke, erstwhile chairman of the Fed, may have boasted that he could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if he had to. Yet at every opportunity since then, the Open Market Committee has flinched. It is not as confident that the economy is as strong as President Obama and the Democratic leadership insist. The only candidate who gets near this issue is Donald Trump.

The Donald has begun to openly blame the Federal Reserve for its role in setting up a “false economy” based on quantitative easing, near zero interest rates, and once unheard of levels of the national debt. He has campaigned against currency manipulation by China and other trading nations, and vowed to renegotiate trade pacts. No one, though, has made a megillah of the plot, open though it may be, to re-write governance of the regional Fed banks in favor of inflation.

This has been nursed by a group called Fed Up, which is agitating to reform the central bank in a leftward direction. The Democratic Party signed on formally at Philadelphia, endorsing a radical plank. On the one hand, it pays verbal fealty to “low inflation.” On the other, the plank vows to ensure “that executives of financial institutions are not allowed to serve on the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks or to select members of those boards.”

That would be essentially a Marxist rewrite of the original concept of the Federal Reserve. No less a figure than Congressman Bill Huizenga, chairman of the House subcommittee on monetary policy, charged last week in an op-ed piece on CNBC’s Web site that the Democrats are trying to take over the Fed by using the “corporate raider’s playbook.” That means moving to stack its board with individuals favorable to, in this case, easy money and inflation.

It used to be, he wrote, that “all directors for each Federal Reserve District participated in the nomination of candidates to succeed their outgoing president.” But through a “Trojan Horse” clause in the Dodd Frank, Mr. Huizenga wrote, the Federal Reserve Act was amended to “silence” during this process those directors who are commercial bankers chosen by bankers to represent the interests of bankers.

By disenfranchising such Class A directors, Dodd-Frank changed the dynamic of picking regional Fed presidents. Last year, Philadelphia’s conservative Charles Plosser was succeeded by Patrick Harker; Dallas’s Richard Fisher, famed opponent of quantitative easing, was succeeded by Robert Caplan; and in Minneapolis, Narayana Kocherlakota, who’d protested President Obama’s stimulus plan, was replaced by Neel Kashkari. All the newbies are more dovish.

That could be only the start if the Democratic platform is implemented, Mr. Huizenga is warning. It would mean “eliminating Class A directors altogether from District boards, and disenfranchising any of the Districts’ shareholding banks from the election of directors.” He derides as false the Democrats’ claim that this would preserve the Federal Reserve’s independence. He calls it a “coup,” a “naked grab for central control.”

Tomorrow, the House Financial Services Committee is set to mark-up new legislation, called the Choice Act, which would not only repeal Dodd-Frank but also re-enact the main provisions of the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act that the House passed after Paul Ryan acceded to the speakership. It would begin the assertion of Congress’s monetary powers in the most dramatic way since the ratification of Bretton Woods. And sound the trumpet in the battle over whether America will use inflation to get out of the debts it has incurred.