For the past several months, President Trump has been looking for ways to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for ignoring his calls to lower interest rates. The president knows that he can only dismiss the Fed chair “for cause,” and that relieving him of his post for no tangible reason would surely be met with court challenges. The chaos that such an action would create in the financial markets is perhaps what the president fears the most.

In the past few days, the president and some of his allies have latched on to something that they think provides them the ammunition they have been looking for. They have accused Chair Powell of mismanaging a renovation work at the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. The estimated project cost is currently $2.5 billion, which is said to be about $700 million above the original budget. The cost overrun, the president and his supporters say, demonstrates the Fed chairman’s poor stewardship.

It is widely assumed that President Trump will not carry out his threat to fire Chair Powell, and will instead name his successor well before the chairman’s term expires in May next year. Doing so, experts say, would undermine Chair Powell’s authority in the remaining months of his tenure. Most people also think that the president will nominate a loyalist who will be more willing to obey his commands.

It is possible that Chair Powell is making a mistake by waiting to lower interest rates, as the president has been claiming. Some influential economists have criticized the Fed for waiting too long to raise rates as inflation started to accelerate in 2021. But no one can tell for sure that the error is being repeated in the other direction. Mr. Powell says he is taking a wait-and-see approach because it is unclear at this point what effect tariffs might have on inflation. That is a perfectly reasonable argument.

In his recent guest essay in The Economist, Richard Clarida, a professor of economics at Columbia University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said this: “Given the president’s relentless attacks on the Fed chief since retaking office in January, his nominee’s commitment to resisting pressure from the White House is sure to be closely scrutinized by Congress and financial markets.” He further wrote: “Moreover, Senate confirmation of the nominee, even under Mr. Trump, is not a rubber stamp. Although Republican senators will be inclined to support the president’s choice, lawmakers take confirmations of Fed chairs very seriously, and by all accounts there is strong bipartisan support in the Senate for the head of the central bank to remain politically independent.”

It is nice to see that Professor Clarida’s faith in the Senate has not been too badly shaken and he is confident that the institution will do its job properly when the time comes to vet the Fed chair nominee. I pray that he is right. Presidents have routinely tried to get the Fed to lower interest rates. But if any previous president had mounted such blatant and coordinated attacks on a Fed boss, at least a handful of senators from the president’s own party would have protested and pointed out the impropriety of that kind of behavior. Unfortunately, we are in a completely different world now. Republican senators have been shamefully silent all these months as a decent, hardworking man is incessantly humiliated publicly.

I vividly recall the shock that most people around the country felt at the end of last year when they learned about President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominees. There was a widespread sense that many of them were unqualified. That, together with the numerous controversies swirling around others, convinced much of the public that a good number of the president’s picks were unconfirmable. All that didn’t matter, however. The Republican-led Senate confirmed every single one of them.

Recently, the nation got another taste of how acquiescent Republicans in Washington have become under President Trump. As the president’s Big, Beautiful Bill was making its way through Congress a couple of weeks ago, the GOP’s deficit hawks insisted for days that there was no way they could vote for it because it would add trillions of dollars to the national debt. In the end, they all abandoned their principles and voted to approve the legislation.

“Lawmakers take confirmations of Fed chairs very seriously,” says Professor Clarida. Many of us thought they did on budget deficits and the national debt as well, but their vote for the Big, Beautiful Bill says otherwise. On the basis of this recent record, one could be forgiven for being skeptical about the ability of Senate Republicans to properly scrutinize President Trump’s nominee to head the Fed. But in life, wonders never end. Perhaps the hitherto pliant lawmakers will pleasantly surprise us when that time comes.