President Trump’s nomination of Governor Jerome Powell to the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve creates a predicament for partisans of monetary reform. At the White House today, the president called Mr. Powell a consensus builder. He represents continuity from Janet Yellen, under whom the Fed created what Candidate Trump called a “false economy.” How, though, does the Powell nomination comport with the Trump campaign?

Then again, too, we have never looked to the Fed itself to lead the cause of monetary reform. For one thing, the Fed made out fine during the Great Recession of the Obama years, racking up enormous sums in what it calls “profits,” while Ms. Yellen and her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, mocked the gold standard. Ms. Yellen opposed even a voluntary rule — like Professor John Taylor’s — to guide the Fed.

Instead, the place to look for reform is the Congress. That’s where the ferment for reform began, as the crisis of 2008 became the Great Recession. The value of a one-dollar Federal Reserve note collapsed, at one point to a 1,900th of an ounce of gold from the 853rd of an ounce it was valued at on the day President Obama acceded to the presidency. No wonder Congress started to ask whether the Fed itself was the solution or the problem.

The House was particularly heroic. Three times it passed, and by bipartisan votes, bills encompassing what Ron Paul liked to called Audit the Fed. The bills were designed to strengthen Congress’s ability to inspect and oversee the operations of the central bank it had created. All the congressional reform efforts were eventually combined into the Financial Choice Act, which passed the House in June.

That effort had a number of leaders (the Speaker, Paul Ryan, and Kevin Brady, not to mention Dr. Paul, before he retired). The final bill was introduced by Jeb Hensarling, who had emerged as chairman of Financial Services, which, among other assignments, oversees the Fed. By our lights, he’d have been a spectacular chairman of the central bank — particularly now that he’s leaving Congress and the Choice Act is stalled in the Senate.

We have already credited Ms. Yellen for the fact that she is one of the few recent chairmen of the central bank to be leaving to her successor a Federal Reserve note that is as strong as the one she inherited. We share the concern of economist Judy Shelton, who, in the interview above, regrets that the position of Fed chairman has become so important. Were we on a monetary system in which the dollar was defined in statute as a given amount of specie, our monetary policy — and the chairmen who do so much to set it — wouldn’t be so political in the first place.