When the Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill finally put down the steak cleavers that have been beating each other, it will be confirmed that Janet Yellen will head the Federal Reserve with relatively little fuss.

Yellen, currently the Fed vice chairman behind outgoing Ben Bernanke, will be the first Democrat to head the nation’s central bank since Paul Volcker left office in 1987. She is widely respected as an economist and could be the best creditor. Head of the Fed in the 100-year history of the institution. Republican opposition to his appointment, although inevitable, will be strictly symbolic. This nomination is the closest thing to a tray of anything in Washington these days.

Yellen certainly offers continuity in the Fed’s hyper-easy money policies, including monthly purchases for $ 85 billion of Treasury-backed debt instruments known as quantitative easing, or QE. While the long-awaited “downsizing” of those purchases is likely to begin soon, possibly even before Yellen takes over her new role, Yellen is likely to push to maintain the ultra-low interest rate environment for longer than almost anyone else. Critics will accuse it of risking a catastrophic collapse in the value of the dollar, as the Fed is basically printing money to finance chronic deficit spending from the US Treasury. But Yellen and her supporters will respond that the dollar has been fairly stable, inflation has been quiet, and unemployment has remained stubbornly high in the five years since the financial crisis, making unemployment the obvious top priority for the Fed.

It all comes down to a question of philosophy about what money is and what monetary policy is supposed to do.

Conservatives would argue that the classical definition of money is to be a store of value and a medium of exchange. These two features allow lenders to put idle capital to work by making it available, at a reasonable rate, to borrowers who are in a better position to use it and earn higher returns. The activities of the borrowers in turn produce greater wealth and more capital for use by society in the interests of further progress. Full employment would come as a by-product, not a source, of prosperity.

Yellen doesn’t seem to embrace this point of view, to put it mildly. She is one of the strongest advocates of quantitative easing, through which the central bank lends large sums to the government at artificially low rates. Its critics say that QE runs the risk of cheapening the currency and stoking inflation, destroying the wealth that money is supposed to store. But he supports the policy in the hope that public spending and cheap, freely available loans will boost employment in the short term, thereby spurring higher demand. Basically, she defends the position that prosperity can come from providing government-funded jobs, regardless of whether those jobs increase the productive capacity of society. In this world view, prosperity is a by-product of full employment, and not the other way around.

My own opinion places me squarely in the conservative camp. I should be among those who are unhappy with Yellen’s appointment, but my real reaction is more complicated.

After all, there was no chance that President Obama would nominate the type of Fed “hawk” (someone whose anti-inflation bias mirrors mine) who would have made the Republicans cheer.

Also, there is the possibility, though not particularly strong, that someone like Yellen, someone whose appointment is wildly popular with Democrats, could be a voice of economic reason within that party. It will be difficult for Obama and other Democrats to ignore Yellen if she argues that the federal budget must be under control with long-term rights reform. You could also argue, that Democrats ignore when Republicans present it, that higher taxes and higher minimum wage laws ultimately hurt employment. She might note that it is counterproductive for the Fed, as a banking regulator, to get involved in so much guesswork that banks are afraid to lend to someone other than the Treasury.

Yellen could advocate for free trade and sensible economic and labor regulation that keeps costs commensurate with profits. It might point out that US tax policy is trapping large amounts of offshore corporate money, preventing it from being invested here, and encouraging fast-growing companies to set up headquarters elsewhere. It could even push for sensitive immigration laws to attract human as well as financial capital.

You are certainly a good enough economist to know how important these things could be to the future prosperity of this country. If she makes these points, it will be difficult for Democrats who pushed hard for her appointment to ignore her, although I imagine some will simply label her a sellout on Wall Street, as swearing is so much easier than listening.

I’m not especially optimistic that Yellen will do these things. I just know that, as chair of the Fed, I could. And I know how much the nation would benefit if I did.

So my optimistic side says let’s go ahead and confirm it. At least it will mean putting the meat cleavers aside for a while.