RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ms. Rao cleared the Senate for that post with bipartisan support—unusual in the Trump era—after an uneventful confirmation process. She’s certainly qualified for a judgeship. Ms. Rao clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, taught for a decade at George Mason University’s law school, and worked in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. She’s an expert on administrative law, which is valuable for a court that hears many challenges to federal regulation.

But here comes BuzzFeed with the scoop of the year that Ms. Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.” Yes, apparently this is why some people get into journalism. The story is clearly an oppo-research dump, probably from the left-wing Alliance for Justice, which is trying to torpedo Ms. Rao.

Not long ago, before everyone’s entire life was politicized, college was a period of intellectual development. Students are young and often write with more passion than wisdom. If writing or remarks at age 22 are disqualifying for public life, then every Member of Congress might as well resign now.

Ms. Rao’s sins aren’t that she was inflammatory but that she is conservative. Ms. Rao took a dim view of racial preferences in a piece about the great African-American scholar, Thomas Sowell. She also wrote that progressives preach tolerance but too often don’t practice it. Q.E.D. Some of her writing is infelicitous or sophomoric, but none of it is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

One supposedly damning piece touches on how alcohol complicates student relationships. “It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions,” Ms. Rao wrote in the Yale Herald. “A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.” We look forward to the same people who assailed Brett Kavanaugh for drinking too much beer finding fault with Ms. Rao’s sobriety.

The real motive for destroying Ms. Rao is maintaining progressive control of the D.C. Circuit to rubber stamp the left’s agenda on climate change, health care and more. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid packed the court during the Obama years, but Ms. Rao replacing Justice Kavanaugh won’t alter the composition of the court.

The left’s strategy is to intimidate a handful of the GOP’s 53 Senators. The main target is South Carolina’s Tim Scott, who has twice scuttled Trump Administration nominees over unfair attacks. The left will try to make it a trifecta by flogging a piece Ms. Rao wrote when she was a reporter for The Weekly Standard. If Mr. Scott reads “The Hottest Duo in Academe” for himself, however, he’ll see reporting that people who flog racial divisions sometimes have their own commercial interests.

The irony is that the left is making Ms. Rao a political target precisely because she’s a woman of color. She’s the daughter of immigrants who landed in Detroit from India in a January 1972 snowstorm with little money and no winter coats, as she told Congress in 2017. The left is afraid she might someday be a Supreme Court nominee.

If the Senate rejects a nominee as qualified as Ms. Rao, it will have descended one rung lower in the confirmation inferno. Ms. Rao will be another important test of the GOP’s ability to stand up to such sorry tactics.