Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner column identifies a surprising source of “adult leadership” on today’s major American public policy issues.

The answer, I think, is where the Founding Fathers seem to have least expected it, from the House of Representatives, and specifically from its Republican leaders.

The Founders expected the House, with all its members elected directly by the people every two years, to be the flightiest branch of government, most susceptible to momentary enthusiasms and nostrums, in need of restraint from a Senate full of old-timers and a president gifted, they hoped, with the gravity of a George Washington.

But that’s not exactly what we see in Washington today. In calendar year 2011 we have seen Speaker John Boehner and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan taking on tough issues and providing adult guidance when others seem to be doing the opposite.

Certainly Barack Obama, touted as an instinctive bipartisan compromiser, has proven to be something like the opposite. True, on occasion he caves in to the opposition — on extending the 2001-03 tax cuts last December, on rescinding an Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulation recently. But he does so grudgingly and with an eye obviously on election politics rather than on public policy.