As the Democrats vent their election year fury on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, they are pouring a fortune — millions — into a campaign to defeat Senator Susan Collins of Maine. They are blaming her for Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which the Senate’s most distinguished woman secured in the extraordinary speech announcing her decision to back the Justice.

Go for it, we say — it’ll only help Ms. Collins. That’s because attacking the Senator over Justice Kavanaugh will draw attention to, in her speech, one of the great teaching moments in the history of the Senate. At the time we called it “more than a profile in courage.” On top of that, we said, it was a “profile in substance.” The Maine Republican met the Democrats’ demagoguery with reason.

What riveted us at the time was what we called the senator’s “fidelity to fairness.” She declared that the confirmation process had become not only “dysfunctional” but also “a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign.” She laced into those who’d declared against Judge Kavanaugh even before the hearings, including some who had declared against him before his name was even announced.

The gutter-level campaign launched in the Senate against Justice Kavanaugh, though, had nothing like the nihilism of the attack just launched by the New York Times. The best deconstruction of it that we encountered is the National Review’s piece about what the Times turned up — hearsay by an accuser about an accusation the victim isn’t making from two generations ago.

Democrats are suggesting, ex post facto, that the FBI investigation, on which it insisted at the 11th hour, was inadequate. What’s really going on, the Wall Street Journal pointed out in an important editorial this morning, is an effort to intimidate not only Justice Kavanaugh but the entire Supreme Court. The way to fight them, Senator Collins suggested in her speech a year ago, is with principles.

“Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them,” she declared in what we suggested at the time would become a famous sentence. She went on to add: “We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”

It certainly looks like the Democrats are determined to put due process in jeopardy in Ms. Collins’ coming campaign for the Senate. It will be a memorable test for a state created in the Missouri Compromise expressly on a point of principle — preventing the balance of power in the Senate tilting in favor of the slave states. Maine couldn’t have a better tribune in this fight than its courageous senior senator.

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Image: Photo by the Congress of the United States, via Wikipedia.