As I write, the fate of Ben Bernanke grows increasingly clouded. It’s been known for several weeks that a debate on his reappointment would require 60 votes in the Senate, due to holds on the nomination placed by strange bedfellows the socialist Bernie Sanders and market-loving Jim Bunning, along with populist conservatives Jim DeMint and David Vitter.

There are plenty of bad reasons to oppose Bernanke, among them that he’s a Bush appointee, and that he was part of the team that didn’t see the financial crisis coming. Bernanke also gets scored for causing the crisis, on the basis of his approval of Greenspan’s decision to hold policy interest rates low in the 2003-04 period.

There are also some good, principled reasons to oppose Bernanke. In the span of mere hours, it seemed, he completely changed the character of the Federal Reserve in March 2008 with the carefully-managed destruction of the Bear Stearns Companies. And even more troubling to Senators on both sides of the aisle was the $85 billion extended to AIG, again on just a few hours’ notice, in September 2008.

It’s worth repeating that Bernanke, as an academic economist, was better prepared than anyone alive to deal with the extraordinary events of 2008. As an academic economist, he spent years analyzing how policy went wrong in two previous deflationary episodes, the Great Depression and the Japanese real-estate crash. And his studies convinced him that the correct response to a major systemic crisis was to respond *immediately and in tremendous size.*

I give Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed (which he manages with a strict consensus-building style), as well as the central bankers elsewhere that he influenced, the lion’s share of the credit for preventing a meltdown of the financial system. Twelve months ago, a global depression was not the most far-fetched possible outcome, but early in March 2009, the financial world began to sense signs of stabilization.

Bernanke had expanded the Fed’s lender-of-last-resort role from the banking system to the financial system as a whole, encompassing capital markets, private investment funds, and broker-dealers as well as depositary institutions. He did this by broadly interpreting Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, the “exigent circumstances” clause.

What was his reaction to having done this? In Congressional testimony shortly after the Bear Stearns resolution, he said that he was disgusted by what he had done, and never wanted to do it again.

The jury is still out on the Bernanke Doctrine. He has led us through the largest experiment in monetary policy that perhaps has ever been conducted. As things stand, the financial system is functioning with a semblance of internal normalcy. But great damage has been done to the real economy, and credit-generating activities in the US private sector are still very far from normal.

In a way, Bernanke saved the banking system from a debilitating global meltdown by encasing it in the amber of wide-ranging guarantees of counterparty obligations. The system is still encased in amber, and it’s not clear what it will take to break it loose.

The US Senate are the people’s representatives, and as such they jealously guard their power and prerogatives in directing economic policy. Yet it’s a commonplace of economic theory and practice that a politically independent monetary authority is essential for keeping inflation under control.

Many of the Senators who are now uneasy about confirming Bernanke’s reappointment are worried about the massive increase in the Fed’s power. But Bernanke and his colleagues are very mindful of the history of their institution. I trust them to be very wary of institutional overreach and abuse of power.

The reason that the modern Fed needs broader powers is because the modern financial system is so much larger, faster and more interconnected than ever before. The Fed’s independence is crucial not only as a bulwark against inflation. It also is critical in fast-moving crises. Nothing exemplifies this better than the tortured process by which Congress was dragged kicking and screaming into approving that TARP plan. The Fed could handle the AIG situation on a day’s notice. And of course, that was done with the full knowledge of Congressional and Administration leadership.

I acknowledge that I just made an argument in favor of a vast concentration of power that is insulated from political control by the people’s elected representatives. Given that, *nothing* is more important than the character and the probity of the people placed in charge of this power.

That brings me to my final point in favor of Bernanke’s reappointment: of all the people who could be considered for the post, he’s the best. He has demonstrated respect for the necessary limits on the Fed’s power, even though these limits are soft rather than hard. He’s an academic economist, committed to honest inquiry. He’s acutely sensitive that in a democracy like America, monetary policy isn’t just about keeping the money sound. It’s also about sustaining the conditions for economic growth and shared prosperity.

Given all that, the Fed chairman should not be a political animal or someone committed to personal or partisan gain. There’s a reason why Fed chairpersons tend to come from the academic ranks rather than from bureaucrats.

By all means, let’s have an open and frank discussion in the Senate about the necessary limits to the powers of the Federal Reserve. But drop the holds on the nomination which are preventing us from having the debate.

And then let’s vote to confirm Chairman Bernanke.