Door Opens For Scrutiny Of Federal Reserve

Voters give GOP pathway for former Rep. Ron Paul’s audit plan

WND

BOB UNRUH

The new Republican majority in the Senate opens a door for a new level of scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, the quasi-public organization that largely controls U.S. monetary policy behind closed doors.

“Will we finally get a vote on audit of the Fed in the Senate?” asked Julie Borowski in a column on the website of the conservative and libertarian lobbying group FreedomWorks.

“The GOP-led House overwhelmingly passed bills to audit the Fed in 2012 and 2014. Back in September, it passed with a bipartisan vote of 333-92. Yet, it was basically dead on arrival in the Senate,” she wrote. “For reasons unconfirmed, Harry Reid refused to allow a vote on the bill – even though he cosponsored audit legislation in the 1990s. The Senate companion bill, introduced by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has 31 cosponsors but never even made it out of committee.”

But with Harry Reid no longer in charge of the Senate, she said, “we’re far more likely to get a vote on audit the Fed.”

The fight for the audit dates back years. Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, repeatedly introduced bills calling for an audit that were adopted in the House but went nowhere in the Senate.

The argument against the Fed centers on Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the power to coin money. There is no mention in the Constitution of a central bank, and it wasn’t until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that the Fed was created.

Ron Paul previously has said: “Throughout its … 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy.”

He proposed repeatedly the idea of auditing the Fed to determine exactly what it has been doing and then begin making corrections. With a book titled “End the Fed,” he’s made no secret of his ultimate goal.

In the book, he argues that the Fed “is both corrupt and unconstitutional.”

The book described the Fed as “inflating currency today at nearly a Weimar or Zimbabwe level, a practice that threatens to put us into an inflationary depression where $100 bills are worthless.”

He contends the Fed, created by private interests, is at fault for much of America’s financial woes over the years.

That the Fed is at least partly to blame for the financial problems that have developed in the U.S. seems not to be in dispute.

Read More Here

Reposted with permission