It’s none too soon for President-elect Trump to think about whom he wants for chairman of the Federal Reserve. Come January, he will have little more than a year to make this decision, given that Janet Yellen’s term as chairman expires in February of 2018. She has so firmly interpreted congressional oversight as a form of political interference that it’s hard to see how she could be anything but an obstructionist in respect of monetary reform. She seems cool even to a centennial review of the Fed’s performance as the central bank commences its second century.

So what about a brilliant and tough-minded constitutional lawyer? Many of the questions surrounding the Fed, after all, have to do with the constitutional concept of money. To what were the Founding Fathers referring when, in the Constitution, they twice used the word dollars? How should that affect our thinking today? Could one find a constitutional maven who also had some political experience, a leader who has even campaigned for the idea of honest money when others were ignoring the issue? Even one prepared to open up the question of a gold standard?

It turns out that there is a figure that meets every one of those particulars — Senator Cruz. The constitutional Texan was the first candidate in the 2016 Republican primary to announce for the gold standard. That happened at the CNBC debate at Boulder, where Rick Santelli asked him for his thoughts on the Federal Reserve and whether he wanted the Congress to get involved in monetary policy. Mr. Cruz was waiting for him. He answered that the Fed was doing a great job ­— inflating stock prices for Wall Street. That, though, wasn’t helping working men and women, Mr. Cruz averred.

The Fed, Mr. Cruz said, “should get out of the business of trying to juice our economy and simply be focused on sound money and monetary stability, ideally tied to gold.” His answer, perfect as far as we’re concerned, electrified the Republican race, as one candidate after another chimed in on the point. These included, with particularly good effect, Donald Trump, who understands exactly how the Federal Reserve has created a “false economy” sustained by quantitative easing and a zero interest rate policy. He grasped exactly that the Fed had left voters out of the gains. The voters seem to have grasped the point, too.

We understand the hullabaloo that would be raised over the fact that Mr. Cruz is not an economist. We also understand how important and smart great economists are. Then again, too, the Federal Reserve Board already employs more than 300 economists, and by the time Mrs. Yellen’s chairmanship draws to a close, it’s likely that all five regular governors and the vice chairman will be economists. No doubt Paul Krugman will write another column saying there are no economists who support the gold standard.

Even if that were true it would only underscore the logic of a Chairman Cruz. We are now approaching the jubilee of the age of fiat money, long enough to know that a dollar without definition in our law is a recipe for disaster. It has been all along the view of the Sun that the problem is not only economic in nature but also legal and constitutional, comprising such issues as enumerated and separated powers and the right to property. All — 100% of — the monetary powers granted in the Constitution are granted to Congress, in which Mr. Cruz has served.

Is Mr. Cruz mature enough to lead an institution like the Federal Reserve? We believe the answer is yes, but there’s no doubt that he has some fences to mend. Not the least of them, to judge solely by the printed record, is with one of the shrewdest voices in the debate, Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal. We haven’t talked to Mr. Gigot about this idea, but one thing the Journal understands is that the most important party to this whole business is America’s voters.

Thanks to Messrs. Trump, Pence, and Cruz, voters had the issue of the Fed put clearly to them in this campaign. Hillary Clinton was horrified. “You should not be commenting on Fed actions when you are either running for president or you are president,” Mrs. Clinton was quoted by Reuters as telling reporters on her campaign plane. Tell that to retirees in Florida who couldn’t get any interest income off their savings. Mr. Cruz helped open the Fed as an issue for the GOP, and it is one of the issues on which the new President will have a mandate.