Senator Susan Collins’ speech announcing her vote for Justice Kavanaugh was so memorably principled and well put that her fans — the Sun included — will grant her license to vote however she wants in respect of President Trump. Not that she needs anyone’s license. Yet we don’t mind saying that the principles the senator articulated in the Kavanaugh case beckon in the case of Mr. Trump for an early acquittal.

The principal principle Ms. Collins marked in the Kavanaugh case was due process. Here’s how she put it in what we predicted would become famous words: “Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

Today those same principles are hanging in the balance in the United States Senate. The Democrats suggest that the issue is witnesses. Were that the only issue, we, too, might be for haling Mr. Bolton before the Senate. Yet Ms. Collins’ “fundamental principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness” have been so traduced during the pursuit of Mr. Trump that it’s hard to imagine any witness redeeming this proceeding.

This goes back to the opening remarks by Mr. Trump’s personal counsel, Jay Sekulow. That’s when he suddenly wheeled on the Democrats and demanded: “What are we dealing with here? Why are we here?” Was this all because of the Trump-Zelensky phone call, he asked rhetorically. “Or are we here, before this great body, because since the President was sworn into office, there was a desire to see him removed?”

Clearly the answer is the latter. There has been irrational, but stubborn, effort to destroy this administration. It started during what might be called constitutional in vitro (we’re thinking of, say, the campaign to incite faithless electors). The abandonment of due process has been abject throughout — an attempt to shift the burden of proof, leakers, anonymous op-ed writers, unnamed whistleblowers.

Our guess is that — net net — the Senate will emerge from this process less inclined than it was at the beginning to see the President’s phone call as impeachable, no matter what is likely to be said by Ambassador Bolton, or any other witness, even the bureaucratic bicuspid who, anonymously, blew the blasted whistle. It will be seen as but part of what we’ve called the long train of powder that has been laid against this administration.

We grasp that Ms. Collins is in a tough spot. She is running for her fifth term in the Senate. A victory would elevate her to the pantheon of vastly powerful senators who have served two generations in the upper chamber. Yet her heroic speech in respect of Justice Kavanaugh has resulted in a extraordinary effort to defeat her for re-election to a fifth term. Some $7.6 million has been raised so far by the Democrat against her.

There is little doubt in the eyes of our sagest source in Maine that for Ms. Collins to vote with the Republican majority at any stage of the impeachment process would infuriate her opponents in Maine even more. She will make her own political calculations, and has more than earned standing to do so. We can’t help thinking, though, that no vote against Mr. Trump will be enough to redeem her in the eyes of today’s Demoratic Party. Her future lies with the principles on which she stood so heroically in her finest hour.

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Drawing by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.