The measure of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ career as a lifelong public servant, including five consecutive terms as U.S. Senator, could well be determined in the next few months by how she votes on President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Trump has already announced his cabinet picks — the officers who’ll be responsible for running the departments of the federal bureaucracy — but they must still be approved by the Senate in its constitutional “Advise and Consent” role. Since the next Senate will be under Republican control by a margin of 53 to 47, an honest review of these appointments by at least some Republicans will be critical.

Trump’s selections, for the most part, lack any relevant experience or demonstrated competency, though that’s not even a threshold job qualification as far as he’s concerned. Trump wants appointees who are totally obsequious, belligerent and appear frequently as guests on Fox News. It’s also helpful if they’re tainted by scandal and at least somewhat unhinged. After all, the point is to plant minions in government who will wield a wrecking ball to their agency, attack Trump’s perceived enemies, garner constant media attention and boot lick the boss.

If history is any guide, Trump will get most of his picks approved because of the deference traditionally afforded to presidential nominations. Still, some areas of government, such as those involving national security, are far too important to be left in the hands of novices or people of questionable judgment, so Trump’s picks should be closely scrutinized by members of both parties.

Pete Hegseth, for instance, has been nominated to become Secretary of Defense, the official responsible for the military’s $800 billion budget and nearly 3 million employees, including over 1.4 million active duty service personnel. Though a former National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hegseth has absolutely no experience or training qualifying him to run an organization as complex as the DOD. He’s never led anything bigger than an infantry platoon.

In fact, it’s unlikely that he would have even come to the attention of Trump but for his appearances on Fox News criticizing “woke” policies at the Pentagon and his book, “American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free,” in which he labeled Democrats and progressives as America’s “internal enemies.”

It’s particularly important to have a highly qualified defense secretary serving in an era when warfare is undergoing enormous changes. As demonstrated by the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, drones and missiles have come to dominate a battlefield once controlled by tanks, artillery, foot soldiers and conventional aircraft. That has tremendous implications for weapons development and acquisition, force levels and deployments, training, strategy and tactics.

Not only does Hegseth lack qualifications for the job, he’s obsessed with the idea that females should play no role in combat and is hostile towards policies designed to protect minorities from discrimination. This is counterproductive, since the military is already having trouble meeting its quotas for recruitment, and women have demonstrated their mettle in combat in the U.S., Israel and at least 15 other nations, while people of color constitute 43% of male and female active duty personnel.

Throughout her career, Collins, has been considered a GOP moderate, someone favoring smaller federal government, a pro-business agenda (especially for small business), a strong military, and, whenever possible, political bipartisanship. She is essentially a traditional post-World War II Republican without the cultural warfare armament of many of her Southern and Midwestern colleagues.

Now that the MAGA movement has completed its hostile takeover over of the GOP, however, she’s become a vestige of an earlier era. Though still popular in Maine, her political survival depends, to a great extent, on her willingness to accommodate Trump and the MAGA heart of her party.

During President George W. Bush’s tenure and Trump’s first term in office, she often backed their legislative measures and nominees despite voicing “tsk-tsk” concerns or resorting to convoluted logic to justify her votes.

Collins expressed concerns about Bush’s proposed first-term tax cuts, citing their potential to generate budget deficits, but she voted anyway for their passage in 2003 and their renewal in 2006. The cuts did, in fact, lead to significant deficits. In 2017, she again voted for a Republican-engineered tax cut, this one backed by Trump, which greatly reduced corporate taxes and repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. After the vote, Collins defended her decision by saying she had received advice from economists that the legislation would not increase deficits and assurances from congressional leaders that they would pass legislation to mitigate the adverse effects of the individual mandate’s repeal. No such legislation was ever enacted, and the cuts, as widely predicted, produced massive deficits.

Though pro-choice, Collins voted to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, claiming she believed he would not overturn Roe v. Wade because he had told her that he considered Roe to be “settled law.” She did so, despite the fact that Kavanaugh, in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute the prior year, had praised Justice William Rehnquist’s dissenting opinion in Roe.

During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, he faced the shocking accusation that he had sexually assaulted Christine Blassey Ford while both were high school students. If determined to be true, this would almost certainly have been disqualifying. Ford, a reluctant witness, appeared before the committee to testify. Though Collins found Ford’s testimony credible, she nonetheless voted in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation, rationalizing that, although the incident likely occurred, Ford was somehow confused about her assailant’s identity.

To be clear, I’m an admirer of Collins. She’s done a lot for her Maine constituents and has shown courage in breaking with her party to support marriage equality, reproductive rights and gun control. She was also one of only seven Republican senators who voted with Democrats to convict Trump on the impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection” following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

But re-election in Maine has grown increasingly difficult for a moderate Republican, particularly as the Second District has moved towards the right. Moreover, Trump, who demands absolute fealty from Republicans in Congress, won’t hesitate to retaliate if she defies him.

The question, then, is whether Collins is willing, if necessary, to put her own political career on the line for the good of the country.

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at [email protected]