It can’t be entirely a coincidence that the first move by a major newspaper against the confirmation of Judy Shelton as a governor of the Federal Reserve should come from the Washington Post. It is, after all, the only newspaper in America to have been launched to glory by, in Eugene Meyer, a just-retired chairman of our central bank. Yet the Post gets into none of that history in its editorial this morning in respect of Ms. Shelton. It’s not hard to see why.

The Post’s beef against Ms. Shelton is not that she lacks for credentials. It calls her academic credentials “strong” and acknowledges that she has held public positions in what we would call two non-political agencies, the National Endowment for Democracy, which she chaired, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to which she is currently America’s representative. What the Post objects to, for starters, is that she’s had an “eminently political career.”

It faults her for having advised the presidential campaigns of Senator Bob Dole, Ben Carson, and President Trump. Yet such Fed chairmen as G. William Miller and Alan Greenspan also advised presidential candidates (respectively, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon). The Post also faults Ms. Shelton for writing op-eds. It must be the first time the publisher of one of journalism’s most distinguished op-ed pages has sought to disqualify a nominee for public service for having written for op-ed pages.

On the one hand, the Post complains about Ms. Shelton flip-flopping on interest rates, depending on the administration. On the other hand, it suggests that the “great cause of her career” has been the gold standard. It says she sees it as a “restraint on central bank currency manipulations” while opponents — “correctly,” the Post avers — see it as an “arbitrary limitation on liquidity that almost strangled the world economy to death in the 1930s.”

Which brings us back to Eugene Meyer. The future proprietor of the Washington Post was made chairman of the Fed by President Hoover, yet was asked to stay on by President Franklin Roosevelt. At first Meyer agreed, but he soon resigned. “In his eyes,” read one account, “Roosevelt’s sins were many, but a few stood out: his experimentation with the dollar, his disregard for the gold standard, and his general lack of sophistication about economic and financial policies.”

That account is by another towering publisher of the Post, Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Graham. It’s in her memoir, “Personal History.” The want of sophistication about economic and financial policies is “a lack shared,” Graham wrote, “by every other president.” Graham relates that her mother was reluctant for Meyer to purchase the Post, but finally concluded that “these are not times in which to loiter” and “what after all is money for if not to be used.”

Indeed. The thing to mark here is that the criticism being levied against Ms. Shelton for hewing to the principle of a gold standard today is from the newspaper that was saved from bankruptcy by a man who gave up the chairmanship of the Fed over not only a point of principle but over the principle of a gold standard. We would but add that there are those who dispute that the gold standard ranks for blame in causing the Great Depression.

Let Ms. Shelton’s confirmation hearings get into it, if the Democrats dare. Not that her nomination is, or even ought to be, about the gold standard. A de jure gold standard would violate the so-called second amendment to the IMF treaty, which we ratified in 1978. So the Fed couldn’t pursue a real gold standard, even if it wanted to — at least not absent action by Congress, the branch to which the Constitution grants all of our government’s monetary powers.

What Ms. Shelton would do at the Fed is to enrich our central bank’s own policy debate with what the Wall Street Journal, in an important editorial issued last week, calls “some much-needed intellectual diversity.” She’s perfect for the job, as is Mr. Trump’s less famous but equally qualified parallel nominee, Christopher Waller. It would be all the more wonderful to have them at the Fed since the principles over which Eugene Meyer quit are no longer prospering at the Post.