The defeat of Steve Moore’s candidacy for a governorship of the Federal Reserve invites a strategic look at the fight over our central bank. This fight has, after all, been brewing a long time — since, in our view, 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window and ended the era of Bretton Woods, when the dollar was redeemable by foreign governments for a 35th of an ounce of gold.*

We share the Wall Street Journal’s admiration for Mr. Moore. It is denouncing, in tomorrow’s edition, the low tactics used against Mr. Moore. It notes that Democrats will never forgive Mr. Moore for being right on taxes. We’ve admired his preparedness to ask “basic, even radical questions about our monetary system, such as whether we need the Federal Reserve in the first place.”

That itself isn’t a question that would be up to the governors of the Fed itself. It’s the purview of Congress, to which the Constitution assigns between 99% and 101% of the monetary powers it grants to our government. It would have been a nice change, though, to have, in Mr. Moore, a governor of the Fed who was not frightened at the thought of opening up the question of reform.

We will never forget watching Chairman Janet Yellen declare, under questioning by Congressman Jeb Hensarling of the Financial Services Committee that she would “resist any rule” that Congress might impose on the Fed, even, as we noted at the time, a non-binding rule that the Fed itself formulates. Even, we quipped, if Congress were to name the rule for Mrs. Yellen.

This isn’t an abstract fight. It grew out of the realization that came over Congress after 2008 that the Fed had missed the signals during the plunge in the value of the dollar that began in the first decade of this century. And that failures of the Fed had helped turn the events of 2008 into the Great Recession. That ought to concern Democrats as well as Republicans (after all, it hobbled the Obama presidency).

Reform measures that the House passed under Paul Ryan’s speakership died in the Senate. We took the possibility that Mr. Trump would nominate Mr. Moore to the Fed as a signal that Mr. Trump might begin redeeming his campaign promises on monetary reform. One promise is for a monetary commission that would review the Fed’s performance in its first century.

The thing to note right now is that the Left was unable to defeat Mr. Moore on that issue. It managed to stop him only by shameful, ad hominem attacks. All the more reason for Mr. Trump to turn to other reform-minded nominees, such as economist Judy Shelton, for whom the Wall Street Journal, in tomorrow’s edition, is reiterating its support, which The New York Sun very much shares.

Mr. Trump clearly has a lot on his plate, between Russia, China, Venezuela, the Mueller Report, the Middle East peace plan, the two trillion infrastructure project, the southern border, Brexit, etc. Compared to monetary reform, though, it’s all relatively dainty stuff. None of it is as strategic as finding a way to restore soundness to the dollar and lock in the kind of growth and jobs without inflation that Mr. Moore has made such a part of his life’s work.

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* Since which the value of the dollar has plunged more than 97%.