The Senate Falls to the GOP

America’s decision this evening to revoke the Democrats’ control of the Senate was the first strategic advance to be called. It started with news that Sherrod Brown of Ohio was defeated, handily, by Bernie Moreno. The change of control was called by Fox News after Deb Fischer, the incumbent Republican in Nebraska, was re-elected, also by a comfortable margin. Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia will replace the retiring Democrat, Joe Manchin. 

This means that no matter who has the presidency it will be hard to pack the Supreme Court. It’s not just the Supreme Court, though, where the GOP Senate will have a central role in the coming Congresses. It’s also the Federal Reserve and the inflationary ideology that guides its monetary strategy. President Trump tried to ignite that debate in 2019, when he nominated economist Judy Shelton to be one of the governors of the Fed.

That ended in defeat for a visionary monetary economist, when Senator Brown maneuvered against her in the Banking Committee. May he have a retirement full of self-reflection. And may the embers of reform start to flicker in the monetary beat, where on the banking committee’s watch the value of a one-dollar Federal Reserve note has fallen to less than a 2,700th of an ounce of gold, a measure, absent reform by Congress, of trouble ahead.

And yet it was Ms. Shelton’s advocacy of sound money that appeared to provoke the ire of Senate Democrats — with Mr. Brown as a particularly vocal opponent. “Judy Shelton is not a conservative,” he thundered on the Senate floor, “she’s off the ideological spectrum.” He groused that “for three decades and in more than 50 publications, including two books,” Ms. Shelton “has advocated returning to the gold standard.”

In Mr. Brown’s telling, a return to honest money “would mean abandoning some of the most important tools we have to make people’s lives better” and “sabotage our economic recovery.” Imagine, though, if the Democrats in the Congress had embraced, rather than excoriated, the cause of sound money. If they had, the inflationary wave they, along with President Biden and Vice President Harris, sparked, could have been averted. 

Ms. Shelton, for her part, tried to educate the solons on this head. During her confirmation hearing she pointed to the Constitution, which assigns to the Congress “the power to regulate the value of U.S. money,” as she put it. She spoke to the Senate of how the Framers understood that “money was meant to be a measure, to be a standard of value.” She stressed the importance of sound money as “a reliable measure so that people can plan their lives.” 

Instead, Mr. Brown and his Senate colleagues turned their backs on Ms. Shelton and opened the way for 9 percent inflation. The logic of her views has only come into sharper relief in the years since her shabby treatment by Mr. Brown and his colleagues in the Senate, with the plunge in value of fiat dollars vis-à-vis gold. It’s no coincidence that the jump in prices — some 20 percent — on President Biden’s watch has accompanied the dollar’s fall.

Voter frustration over that price inflation was a critical factor animating the voters’ apparent turn against the Democrats on Election Day. That’s all the more reason for the next Congress, including a GOP Senate, to take up the question of monetary reform that Ms. Shelton broached in 2020. After all, no real progress against inflation will be possible until we ensure, as Ms. Shelton puts it, that our “money is trustworthy.”

Which brings us back to the election. The GOP triumph in the upper chamber will clip the wings of those, like Senator Whitehouse, who sought to impair the independence of the Supreme Court. It means Senator Schumer will depart as majority leader. That, in turn, means Jewish students at Columbia University might finally find a friend in the Senate who will work with the GOP. And the rest of America, too, can move forward.