Could the Congress step in where the Fed has failed on inflation? That’s the panic of the ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, newly minted Nobel laureate. With the Fed having trouble getting back to its inflation target of two percent, there’s talk of moving the goal to three percent or even four percent — or slow-walking the return to two percent. Should the Fed consult Congress? Mr. Bernanke fears it might want to go for one percent.

“The Congress let us put in an inflation target without being part of the process,” Mr. Bernanke told a recent panel. Yet he has bad memories of the House Financial Services chairman telling the Fed “under no circumstances will you raise the inflation target.” So, Mr. Bernanke fears, “I think if you did it, you would have to consult with Congress,” he added. “And you might find out in the end that your inflation target is one.” Meaning, one percent. 

In other words, leave Congress out of it, because it might try to impose a lower inflation target than the Fed is willing to entertain. This, at a time when prices are up 4.9 percent year over year and proving resistant to the Fed’s campaign of interest rate hikes. The suggestion of a goal of one percent prompted laughs at the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Bernanke was touting a new edition of his history of our central bank. 

In the discussion, Mr. Bernanke professed to see the wisdom of easing up on the inflation fight — and dodging any legislative meddling. A backer of a higher inflation goal, economist Olivier Blanchard, noted it “might be very hard” for the Fed to get back to two percent, and so, even if the central bank doesn’t formally jettison the goal, “it may not be in a hurry to get to two.” Replied Mr. Bernanke: “I agree in theory,” eliciting chuckles. 

Yet “one thing nobody talks about is politics,” Mr. Bernanke lamented. By “politics,” the ex-chairman means oversight of the Fed by the elected solons — meaning, the Congress — who are granted 100 percent of the monetary powers granted in the Constitution to our government. This indignation over what he sees as intrusion into the rarefied workings of the central bank has been a leitmotif of Mr. Bernanke’s career in government.

This wasn’t the thinking of the Framers when they drafted the Constitution. They opted to give the monetary powers — to coin money and regulate the value thereof, to borrow on the credit of the United States, to regulate interstate commerce, to fix the standard of weights and measures, and all the rest — to the branch that, in Congress, is, because it is the so frequently before the voters, the most “political.” 

Until 1913, when Congress decided to delegate its powers by forming the Federal Reserve, questions of banking and money — and even the details of each bond issue — were the subject of perennial debates on the floor of the House and Senate. The hope was that the Fed would prove a sound steward of the dollar and keep prices stable. Yet since the Fed’s creation, the dollar has shed more than 98 percent of its value as measured in gold.

At a time of rising Congressional skepticism of the Fed, Mr. Bernanke is choosing a particularly inapt moment to mock the idea of the legislature playing a greater role in using the monetary powers it was granted in the Constitution. Senators Cruz and Lee, along with members of the House Freedom Caucus, are among the solons calling for reform of the Fed and decrying its mismanagement of financial conditions and the banking sector — not to mention the dollar itself.

The Fed’s financial experiments, like “quantitative easing” and keeping interest rates artificially low, along with the dismissal of the budding inflation wave as “transitory,” are prompting on Capitol Hill a new look at the central bank, Politico has reported, after a “period of political insulation.” Far from being chastened, Mr. Bernanke is as confident as ever in the bank’s abilities — and the need to keep the Fed safe from the politicians who created it.