The state Court of Appeals’ smackdown of Democrats’ naked disregard for the state Constitution and the voters’ will was a victory for fair play. Blame Gov. Kathy Hochul and Albany Democrats for the attempted power play — and for the resulting chaos.

With a special master drawing up new House and state Senate districts, the courts have moved those primaries from June to Aug. 23; the Legislature may move the remaining primaries to that date to avoid having two separate primary elections, and because statewide candidates might have to re-do the petition process since their old petitions may not hold up under the new maps.

Ironically, that’d be a boon to Hochul, since she’d likely get a chance to replace disgraced, now-ex Lt.-Gov. Brian Benjamin on the primary ballot.  

Commenting on talk of consolidating the elections, Hochul demurred, “There’s time to look at the options [and] find out what’s best for the voters.”

Now she wants “what’s best for voters”? The time to prioritize that was before she signed off on the nakedly voter-repressing gerrymander.

As the courts ruled, it’s obvious that New York Democrats drew the hyper-partisan maps with one eye on helping the national party keep its House majority, and the other on reducing Republicans to an utterly impotent minority in the state Senate. And Hochul and the Legislature utterly ignored the voter-passed requirement that redistricting be a truly bipartisan process.

Heck, when asked if she planned to use her power over redistricting to boost Dems’ House hopes, Hochul answered, “Yes.” And when she signed the “Hochulmander” into law, she told The New York Times she was acting as a “loyal Biden Democrat.”

As her Democratic challenger Rep. Tom Suozzi tweeted after the courts slapped down the power play: “Another failure for New York’s dysfunctional government and Kathy Hochul.”

So much for a governor who took office vowing to change the culture of Albany. With her foolish Benjamin pick, her obsessive fund-raising from special interests, her near-billion-gift to the (out of state) owners of her hometown football team, her ballooning of the state budget, her failure to win major fixes to New York’s demented criminal-justice “reforms” and now the Hochulmander disaster, she’s proved herself as much a creature of that corrupt culture as her disgraced predecessor, Andrew Cuomo.