In the feud between President Trump and the Fed chief, Jerome Powell, the Sun is on the side of James Madison. And Alexander Hamilton — and, while we’re at it, William McKinley and Andrew Jackson, too. That is, the side of those who forged America’s monetary principles. From that vantage point it doesn’t make sense for the president to have to send notes to the Fed chief, whom he appointed, to beg him to lower interest rates.

After all, if the president is able to appoint Mr. Powell, shouldn’t he just as easily be able to fire him, too? Nor does it make sense for the head of the Fed to be griping about the president who proposed him for the job, or balking at his policies — including the tariffs Mr. Trump is wielding as an instrument of policy. In these columns we try to avoid telling the Fed what to do. What we want is for the Congress to exercise the monetary powers granted to it.

The squabbling between Messrs. Trump and Powell is a reminder of how anomalous the Fed is in the constitutional scheme. The Framers meant for the Congress to wield the monetary powers of the federal government: Congress shall have, the Constitution says, the power to “regulate commerce,” “to borrow money on the credit of the United States,” and “to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin.” Plus, the power to “fix the standard of weights and measures.”

Using those powers Congress, at Hamilton’s behest, put America on a specie standard. The dollar was defined in law by a fixed weight of silver — and gold — in the Coinage Act of 1792. Dollars were convertible on demand for specie at about a 20th of a gold ounce. The discipline of convertibility led to decades of growth with low inflation — just 0.2 percent a year on average between the Coinage Act and 1913, when the Fed was formed. 

Since the Fed’s creation, though, the dollar’s value has plunged to less than a 3,330th of a gold ounce. This debasement followed the cession by Congress of its monetary powers to the central bank, which has proven a poor steward of the dollar. Nor, indeed, is the Fed operating at a profit, or even, technically, solvent. For these reasons, Mr. Trump could well have grounds to terminate, for cause, Mr. Powell from his job. 

Does the president really need to show cause to fire the head of any federal agency, though? That idea is crosswise with the Framers’ idea of the president as sole repository of the Executive Branch’s powers. Mr. Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, says he fails to see how the Fed, which is “wrong” on policy and has “been wrong for decades,” can be “a place where there deserves to be an exception” to the Constitution’s bar on “independent” agencies.

So far Mr. Trump has shied from testing his authority on this head. That could be the result of the Supreme Court suggesting, in an unrelated dispute, that his acknowledged power to fire federal agency chiefs — and board members — could be crimped when it comes to the Fed, because it “is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity” in the “distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

That would have startled Jackson, who staked his presidency on sound money and levied a political “war” against the Second Bank, which he saw as a threat to democracy. This is the context in which Mr. Trump mocks Mr. Powell as “Too Late,” derides his intelligence, and sends notes urging interest rates to fall “between Japan’s 0.5% and Denmark’s 1.75%,” per the AP. Mr. Powell says “the prudent thing to do is to wait” to see the effect of tariffs. 

Madison and Hamilton would be flummoxed by this brouhaha. As the first treasury secretary saw it, Uncle Sam’s main task was to assure the dollar’s convertibility at the fixed weight of gold legislated by Congress. Interest rates rose and fell, as needed, to encourage or discourage the flow of gold and silver into or out of American bank vaults. That is the monetary system that the Framers envisioned and that awaits restoration along with a Constitutional dollar.