Two Mainers saved our republic, one hundred and fifty-five years apart.

On July 2, 1863 Brewer native and Union Army colonel Joshua Chamberlain led the 20th Maine regiment in the legendary defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

On Friday, October 5, 2018, Caribou native and U.S. senator Susan Collins delivered a scholarly and meticulous exegesis from the floor of the Senate chamber on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, and defense of the bedrock American rule-of-law centered on evidence, and presumption of innocence for the accused.

Who would argue with Senator Collins's empathy for sexual abuse survivors while not conflating that status as a self-identified survivor or victim with being evidentiary or possessing objective truth?  Merely asserting oneself a survivor suggests a misdeed by someone, someplace, sometime.  But without direct evidence about whom, where, and when, an assertion remains an unperfected open-ended claim, having neither deed nor title.

Who would argue with Senator Collins's stellar legal analysis of Kavanaugh's most important opinions authored on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Kavanaugh's perspective on the most important SCOTUS opinions over the last two centuries?

Who would argue with her lesson in foundational principles forming our constitutional republic, guaranteeing fundamental rights of fairness, and due process?  Who would argue with her appeal for decency and the right to free expression without fear of violence or retribution?

Not Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island (J.D., Yale), famed prosecutor and litigator before the R.I. Supreme Court, who devoted his own piercing scholarship to pursuing silly high school yearbook scribblings when Kavanaugh was a teenager.

Certainly not Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii (J.D., Georgetown) who declared Kavanaugh guilty of uncorroborated criminal allegations because he doesn't share her judicial philosophy.  And where men's voices should be duct-taped and rendered illegitimate.  How did Senator Hirono graduate from Georgetown Law, and pass the Hawaii bar, when she skipped GT Law courses Federal Rules of Evidence 412 and 415?

Not New Jersey senator Cory Booker (J.D., Yale) who announced his opposition to Kavanaugh on the day Kavanaugh was nominated for SCOTUS because as a constitutional originalist, Kavanaugh was aligned with the Founders, who were rooted in racism and misogyny.

And not Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal (J.D., Yale), and for 20 years the attorney general of Conn., who had the shameless nerve to lecture Kavanaugh about "falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" while Blumenthal repeatedly lied about serving in the Marine Corps in Vietnam.

Susan Collins would not be bullied by the tribal radical mob.  She and her staff have endured weeks of the most vile, ugly, reprehensible, and despicable protests, mailings, phone calls, physical intimidation, and direct threats.

Susan Collins would not be dragged into the world of medieval savagery where spectral evidence, mere innuendo, hysteria from bad dreams, and identity politics have replaced reason, logic, fairness, and objective equity.

Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun, had this to say in an editorial, "Susan Collins Game Changer," soon after Collins's brilliant oration:

Yet what strikes us about Senator Collins' magnificent moment is that it is about more than courage – it is a profile in substance.  The Maine Republican is practically the only person in the Senate to approach this decision by reasoning out the substance of the constitutional questions that have the Democrats so panicked.  She parsed the parchment's preambular purpose of a more perfect union.

This didn't entirely surprise us.  For we have twice or thrice encountered the senator in the dining room of one of America's greatest newspaper publishers, Alan Baker, back when he owned the Ellsworth, Maine, American.  Those dinners were off the record, but we don't think it would violate the ground rules to say we came away from the table with an enormous regard for Ms. Collins' character.

How that shone through.  The senator touched on Brown v. Board of Education (which ended separate but equal), Griswold v. Connecticut (which found among the shadows and penumbras of the Bill of Rights an entitlement to privacy), and Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  She spoke of Judge Kavanaugh's articulation of the logic – and constitutional glue – of precedent.

And where was Maine's other senator?  Angus King (J.D., Univ. of Virginia), the self-anointed independent, was hiding behind Democratic party talking points, shallow and superficial, all drafted by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's press office.

Susan Collins will be vilified by the rabble.  The rabble, unable to comprehend her monumental lessons to the nation, may frustrate her re-election chances in 2020.

But the rabble can never tarnish Susan Collins's finest hour as the stateswoman who stood alone, and saved the Union, at least for a while, from a descent into totalitarian bedlam.