When are Sen. Susan Collins’ votes going to start aligning with her rhetoric? She presents herself as a moderate yet keeps voting for disgraceful nominees for judgeships and administrative positions.

Earlier this month, she voted to confirm Bernard McNamee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. This was in spite of his publicly stated bias in favor of fossil fuels over renewables.

He said in February: “There’s an organized propaganda campaign against fossil fuels. We all know it. We all see it. The problem is, it’s taken hold. You talk to millennials, you talk to housewives, you talk to people in corporate boardrooms now, they are all buying into this.” It’s taken hold because all these people talk to scientists. Maybe the senator should try that. Putting McNamee in this job is not putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop – it is putting the arsonist in charge of the fire department.

On the judicial front, the senator’s vote for Brett Kavanaugh was only the tip of the iceberg. Her poor judgment about the law was evident in her fawning support for Jeffrey Sessions, a man who never saw a civil rights enforcement action he didn’t despise, as attorney general.

Since then, she has voted to confirm numerous federal judges whose records of prejudice cried out for rejection, as The New York Times recently reported. Since many of these jurists are quite young, that is a legacy that will persist after she and I are both long gone.

I can only wish that the senator would wake up, smell the corruption, the criminality, the absolute contempt for this nation’s reputation that flows from the White House and stop helping it do its dirty work.

Neil Gallagher

Brunswick