In a fat slap at state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and the arrogant far-left coterie that now runs the Legislature, a trial-court judge ruled Tuesday that the full Senate must vote on a governor’s nominee to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest bench.

In a nine-page opinion, state Supreme Court Judge Thomas Whelan wrote that committee votes “cannot substitute for the power reserved to the Senate by the constitution,” though ASC (D-Yonkers) and other Democrats had argued for weeks that the Judiciary Committee’s 10-9 vote against the Hector LaSalle nomination was sufficient.

ASC tried to avoid this slapdown by belatedly calling a snap floor vote to torpedo LaSalle last week, but Whelan let a GOP senator’s suit proceed anyway, since the larger issue still stands.

No Senate leader had ever tried this stunt before, by the way, and Gov. Kathy Hochul had also called out the no-vote move as unconstitutional — whereas no one challenged ASC’s power to fix that Judiciary vote by stacking the committee with LaSalle opponents, only slammed it for the dirty trick it was.

And this slapdown follows last year’s state-court humiliation of the Legislature, tossing out progressives’ bid to gerrymander New York’s US House and state Senate districts, in clear defiance of the state Constitution as amended by the voters.

Indeed, the drive to reject LaSalle, and progs’ demand for a nominee who’ll pull the courts hard-left, is plainly rooted in that earlier defeat: They want a top court that will endorse the next gerrymander, and indeed read progressives’ wish-list into New York law without the need for legislation.

Yet refusing a floor vote for LaSalle, even though ASC always insisted she had the votes to sink him, was also an added power play against Hochul: The gov plainly realizes the far-left agenda on everything from crime to taxes means disaster for the state; progressives want her to think she’ll get nothing but humiliation if she fights the lunacy.

Instead, Hochul now knows she has at least a shot at the support of the judicial branch. And since the progs are plainly determined to use their temporary power to lock in permanent control of state government, the gov has every reason to fight long and hard going forward: The future of democracy in New York is at stake.