News that the White House is asking Senate Democrats to meet with Jerome Powell suggests that President Biden is considering nominating him for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve but is uneasy about the chances of him getting confirmed. That’s understandable. The upper chamber is evenly divided, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts calls him “a dangerous man.”

This is the moment for some solon to ask Chairman Powell, a lawyer-turned central banker, about whether he tried to sink the nomination of Judy Shelton to be a governor of the Fed. We raised the question in an editorial last month. It focused first on a flurry of calls that Mr. Powell made to half a dozen senators, some the afternoon before and others the day the Senate voted on her nomination. She lost by a single vote.

Mr. Powell’s phone calls aren’t exactly a state secret. They are listed in the chairman’s calendar on the Fed’s own Web site. Yet when we sent out queries to the various senators and the Fed itself, we only got one answer. It was from Senator Tillis, known around the Sun as “Transparent Tillis.” He said Ms. Shelton hadn’t come up in the phone call he had with Mr. Powell. None of the other solons we queried, nor the Fed, got back to us.

The editorial itself did not pass without comment. “Kind of makes your blood boil…,” tweeted one Fed watcher, Danielle DiMartino Booth. The key point is that it raises the question of whether Mr. Powell had violated the ethic that requires the Fed to stay neutral in confirmation fights; he himself, after all, has acknowledged that it would be inappropriate for a chairman — or any member of the Fed — to be weighing in on a nominee.

Mr. Powell acknowledged that in an exchange with Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton at a hearing shortly after President Trump signaled he intended to nominate Ms. Shelton to a Fed governorship. Ms. Wexton asked Mr. Powell about the gold standard. The chairman immediately noted that this could be considered commenting on a particular nominee and “of course I would not do that.”

“We do not play a role in the nomination process,” Mr. Powell dilated. “It’s totally up to the President and the Senate, and we are completely on the sidelines.”

About this flurry of phone calls Ms. Shelton was asked by James Grant at the most recent conference of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, where he interviewed the former nominee on stage. “Maybe my name didn’t come up” during the calls, Ms. Shelton said. “I’ll assume it didn’t, because it would be improper, as Chairman Powell has acknowledged . . . So I assume I wasn’t part of that conversation. But I did notice.”

One call that piqued Ms. Shelton’s interest, Grant’s reported her as relating, was the one to Senator Romney at 6:15 p.m. the day before the vote. That’s because it was late in the day. She noted that Senator Grassley, a Shelton supporter, announced he would have to miss the vote because he was quarantining in respect of Covid. Yet Mr. Romney refused to pair his “nay” vote with Mr. Grassley’s lost “yea,” a common courtesy in the Senate.

The 2012 GOP presidential candidate would not oblige, Grant’s notes, and Ms. Shelton wound up losing by one vote. “Had Romney done that for Grassley,” Grant’s quotes Ms. Shelton as relating, “it would have been a tie, and Vice President Pence would have broken the tie in my favor, something he assured me of a few hours later.” Grant’s ran its story under the headline, “Lobbyist Jay Powell.”

The raptness of the attention Grant’s audience gave to Ms. Shelton brings us to a broader point. The Republicans have a chance to make monetary policy a powerful issue in the coming campaign. The dollar is having trouble fetching an 1,800th of an ounce of gold, gasoline is at $7 a gallon in some parts of the country, and grocery prices, if groceries can be found at all, are soaring. CPI inflation is running above 5%. The opportunity knocks to take the issue of fiat money to the hustings.