President Obama is scrambling to shore up support for the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, amid signs that his nomination to a second four-year term might be in trouble. This is what passes for change from a president who campaigned for office on a promise to deliver exactly that.

The right move for the Senate at this juncture is to use the confirmation process for Mr. Bernanke to open up the question of the Federal Reserve itself and the need for a reform of the laws in respect of the dollar. This is because the problem with the Federal Reserve isn’t its personnel but rather the Fed itself.

One problem with the Fed is that Congress has given it two contradictory missions, so that it is charged with ensuring, on the one hand, price stability and, on the other hand, full employment. Even more fundamental is the question of whether the Fed is constitutional, a matter that has yet to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

This was pointed out by, among many others, a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Viera, Jr., who has emerged as a leading advocate of monetary reform. He argues that Congress’ delegation of power over banking to the Fed is comparable to Congress’ delegation of power over the rest of American business to the National Recovery Administration. The NRA was challenged in the 1930s by a poultry business in Brooklyn and found to be unconstitutional. Questions of the delegation of monetary powers to the Fed, and even the monetary powers of Congress itself, have also yet to be resolved by the courts.

Here are five questions the Congress could usefully open up:

1) Is our system of fiat money at the root of our economic problems? In recent years, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, along with Secretarys of the Treasury Rubin, Paulson, and Geithner, among others, have told the nation that we are on the brink of a meltdown of our financial system. This calamity could be avoided by reasserting the monetary powers and disabilities of the Constitution and establishing a monetary system with gold and silver as money. Why should we have a monetary system that puts savings, pensions, annuities, and even our very lives at risk?

2) Is our system of fiat money constitutional? At the Constitutional Convention, America’s founders debated whether to give the government the power to issue paper money, in those days called “emitting bills of credit.” Such a power was overwhelmingly rejected. Accordingly, in Article I Section 8, the Constitution gives the government to power to “coin money.” There is no power to issue legal tender irredeemable paper-ticket-electronic money.

3) How would the founders of America have felt about our system of fiat money? Aside from Benjamin Franklin whose printing business actually printed the Colonial money, virtually all of the founders were emphatically against paper money. Madison, father of the Constitution, wrote, for example, “Paper money is unjust; to creditors, if a legal tender; to debtors, if not legal tender, by increasing the difficulty of getting specie. It is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property as much as taking away equal value in land.” George Washington wrote that it was “wicked.” The founders were not thinking in economic terms, they wanted a moral government.

4) Is there a way to return to the era of honest money that obtained during the early years of our republic? Several years ago, Congressman Ron Paul introduced “The Honest Money Act,” designated as HR2779, to eliminate legal tender, the coercion in our monetary system. His bill, like his legislation to audit the Fed, could unite right and left, by reviving the campaign of the American Federation of Labor which, at the end of the 19^th century, raised these questions: If our money is not bogus, why do we need legal tender laws to force people to use it? If our money is bogus, why should people be forced to use it?

5) Can this be done responsibly without a new American revolution? This can be done responsibly while leaving everything in place, including the Federal Reserve along and its irredeemable paper-ticket-electronic “dollar.” What needs to be done is to pass Dr. Paul’s Honest Money Act, distribute per capita the gold supposedly still in Fort Knox, and open the United States Mint to free coinage of gold and silver denominated not in “dollars” but by weight. Over time, for long-term transactions, people will make a transition to using gold and silver as money, which, when available, have always been the preferred choice for money. At some point, what we now call the dollar, which is in no way related to the dollars mentioned in the Constitution, will fade away.

I predict that once Congress has asked and answered these questions, it will then know whether to appoint a new chairman of the Federal Reserve or to embark on a more radical course under the Constitution they are sworn to preserve and defend.

Mr. Parks, executive director the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education and a contributing editor of The New York Sun, can be reached at Lparks@fame.org.