The 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast made the elephant the Republican Party’s symbol, but today the hamster would be more suitable for congressional Republicans. The phrase “hamster wheel” is an American idiom for energy expended pointlessly.
Now, however, some of those Republicans might have managed to reach a destination: exasperation with their role as ratifiers of presidential whims. Perhaps Donald Trump has at last gone too far for those legislators weary of going nowhere.
He wants to prosecute Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, his pretext being cost overruns on the remodeling of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters. This is one of Trump’s especially pointless tantrums, given that Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Trump has, however, clarified the debate about the Fed’s “independence.” And he has perhaps finally provoked a Republican recoil against his ambitions to control everything, including interest rates. He seems to want them low, at every point of the business cycle, forever.
He wants to pack the Fed’s board of governors with compliant ciphers. So, if he nominates Kevin Hassett as Powell’s replacement, the Senate, which has much to make amends for (Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, et al.), might rediscover its independence and reject Hassett.
The Fed’s declared aspiration is to cut in half the value of U.S. currency every 36 years. That would be the result of the Fed’s achieving its target of only 2 percent annual inflation. More likely, the target will become 3 percent, halving the currency’s value in 24 years. Annual $2 trillion budget deficits throughout the business cycle will produce an irresistible temptation for inflation — slow-motion repudiation of the national debt.
Never mind that. Many people do, however, mind that the Fed, whose primary function is to protect (somewhat; as it sees fit) the currency as store of value, is not “democratically accountable.”
But that anodyne phrase, as the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane (who blogs as the Grumpy Economist) grumpily insists, means “politically influenced.” The Fed is not “independent” from Congress, which created it, defines its mandate, confirms the Federal Reserve Board’s members and could reject the president’s choice to replace Powell.
There is nothing scandalous, or even anomalous, about the Fed’s being somewhat insulated from democratic majoritarianism. Under today’s regime of rampant presidents and congressional passivity, Fed “independence” means: The president can shape the board’s composition (only somewhat, because the board members serve staggered terms), but the president cannot directly command the Fed’s decisions.
Confining majoritarianism is as American as the Constitution, which is a counter-majoritarian instrument. It says the majority shall rule, eventually, but under mitigated democracy, majority sentiment is slowed, cooled, and refined by passage through bicameralism, presentment to the president, and judicial scrutiny. The Bill of Rights, whose first five words are “Congress shall make no law,” is a fabric of proscriptions against majority excesses.
All this has been called the “counter-majoritarian difficulty,” but actually is the nation’s political glory, which would be enhanced by blocking a Hassett promotion.
The Peter Principle (from the 1969 book) is that people get promoted to their level of incompetence. Hassett, chair for two years of the Council of Economic Advisers in Trump’s first term, currently is Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. Hassett has developed a promiscuous, one-night-stand relationship with principles and facts.
In an earlier incarnation, he was an ardent anti-protectionist who called free trade “a key ingredient in the recipe for prosperity.” In 2021, he published “The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism.” But in 2025, never was heard a discouraging word from him as Trump made the federal government the largest shareholder in Intel, took for the government a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, demanded for the government 25 percent of the revenue from Nvidia’s sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China, and endorsed price controls on credit (a 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates).
Hassett predicted that Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts would produce a $4,000-$9,000 increase in average household incomes. That has not happened. Early in the pandemic, he predicted it would soon wane. It did not. Writer Steve Chapman, who calls Hassett “a master of opportunistic amnesia,” notes that no states had gas prices averaging as low as $2 when Hassett said prices are “below $2 a gallon in a lot of places.”
Trump values Hassett for his plasticity, and disdains Senate Republicans for theirs. He might give them an opportunity to make amends.
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