It’s official: Enron has been forgotten.

I’m perfectly serious. I doubt very much that the average policymaker, whether it be a member of Congress or a regulator with a flag in his or her office, could give you a cogent explanation of what Enron was, how it happened, and above all, why it matters. If they could, and if they cared one whit about the subject, the law that was passed in reaction to Enron and the other scandals of the early part of the decade—the Sarbanes-Oxley of 2002—would not be in danger of extinction.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created by Sarbanes-Oxley, which was designed to ride herd over the auditors whose eagle-eyed gaze is (theoretically) supposed to keep public companies from cooking the books. Meanwhile, there’s a move in Congress, not opposed by the Obama administration, to exempt most companies from a key provision of the law, Section 404, which requires public companies to report on the effectiveness of their internal controls.

This may sound technical, but it gets to the heart of the relationship between government and business. If government can’t insist on public companies coming clean about their internal controls, and if accounting firms that audit the books of public companies are not properly supervised, then another Enron is guaranteed to take place. Not a possibility or a probability, but a certainty. Yet there’s little indication that either Congress or the Securities and Exchange Commission—which has done woefully little to enforce Sarbanes-Oxley—are alert to the dangers posed by insufficient oversight of public companies. They’ve already let Wall Street slip through their grasp, so public companies—their executive suites filled with eager campaign contributors—are obviously not going to be on their hit list anytime soon.

That’s a shame. Enron matters not because it was a cloud-cuckoo-land exception to the norms of Corporate America, but was an example of the rule, which is that publicly held corporations need strong regulation to protect their shareholders and the public. Enron and all the other blemishes on Corporate America that surfaced in the early part of this decade—Global Crossing, WorldCom-MCI, Adelphia Communications—had several features in common. Their CEOs were unethical, their accounting was riddled with trickery, and their accounting firms were inept.