From [HERE] President Biden has made his pick for the U.S. Supreme Court: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. She has a thin appellate record. At least on regulation and business questions, she’s probably to the left of retiring Justice Stephen Breyer. We’ll see what Senate vetting brings, but the GOP shouldn’t indulge in the left’s scorched-earth tactics.

Judge Jackson’s elevation wouldn’t change the Supreme Court’s direction in the near term, since she’d replace a fellow liberal. But at age 51 she could serve for three decades. Although Judge Jackson clerked for Justice Breyer, she might lack his pragmatic and independent streak. He is less hostile to business and religious liberty than Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

What about Judge Jackson? It’s hard to know for sure. She was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit last June, but her first opinion didn’t arrive until this month. It was a victory for public-employee unions on a matter of administrative law. It was also unanimous, as was her second opinion. As a district judge since 2013, Judge Jackson made hundreds of rulings. That is a different kind of work, involving judicial fact finding and so forth, and we’ll soon discover how much can be gleaned from it.

Mr. Biden’s other criteria that must be mentioned, unfortunately, are race and sex. He promised in 2020 to put a black woman on the High Court, and Judge Jackson is a black woman. But the Senate should focus on her record. “I’ve experienced life in perhaps a different way than some of my colleagues because of who I am,” she said last year. But she added that “race would be the kind of thing that would be inappropriate to inject into my evaluation of a case.”

It’s notable, though, that Mr. Biden seems to have made the choice that most progressives wanted. Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose endorsement in the 2020 South Carolina primary helped Mr. Biden win the White House, pushed for district Judge J. Michelle Childs. She attended state schools, which is another form of diversity the Supreme Court lacks, and she was the first black woman to be partner at a major South Carolina law firm.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham all but said he’d vote for Judge Childs. Yet progressives smeared her as corporate stooge, and President Biden is nothing if not a man who follows his party. Reacting to the nomination of Judge Jackson, an Ivy Leaguer, Mr. Graham was wary. “The radical Left has won President Biden over yet again,” he tweeted Friday. “I expect a respectful but interesting hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Harvard-Yale train to the Supreme Court continues to run unabated.”

As Mr. Graham says, the public is owed hearings that are respectful, thorough and, yes, even interesting. Judge Jackson is on Harvard’s board of overseers, while the Supreme Court is poised to consider the school’s racial preferences in admissions. Some of her prominent rulings as a district judge were reversed. Another has a footnote on the first page to explain that it “uses the term ‘noncitizen’ in lieu of the term ‘alien.’”

All fair game. But Republicans should refuse to engage in the politics of personal destruction that Democrats routinely wage. Many Republicans may be frustrated that they don’t have more leverage, but elections have consequences. Mr. Biden won in 2020, and then President Trump’s claims of a stolen election in Georgia cost the GOP control of the Senate. Conservatives are paying the price again.