The state’s highest court, our man in Albany reports at page one today, has told the Transit Authority that it can’t legally fire a New York City bus driver and a subway operator. The subway operator failed to set a hand brake, resulting in a derailment — after he had already been suspended twice for safety violations. The bus driver had been named by Newsday as having been involved in seven accidents or incidents in 12 months; he was fired after striking a pedestrian, according to the court decision.

Well, it’s fine by us if the state courts think that the union contracts governing arbitration ought to trump the safety of pedestrians and subway riders. While it may be nice that the transit officials wish to set a higher standard for safety, it’s a bit naïve as well. These civil service laws and public employee union contracts are designed to make job security paramount over excellence, safety, and other concerns. That is the way civil service laws work, and our courts, if not the rest of us, are by now, for better or worse, resigned to it.

But imagine if such a principle were applied when the life and death of the nation is at stake. That’s precisely the point at issue as Congress wrestles with the homeland security department that President Bush has sought. Suppose that the substandard employee doesn’t just derail an empty subway train or run over a pedestrian. Suppose he lets a terrorist onto an airplane, or loses track of some enriched uranium, or — well, the nightmare of September 11 remains near enough to the minds of most New Yorkers that we need not spell out the gory details.

We’ll stipulate that most federal employees — like most bus drivers and subway operators — are working hard to do the best job they can. Our civil service, at the state and federal level, is filled with many selfless, hard working idealists. All the more reason, though, for people to wonder why it should be so hard to toss out the bad apples? The unions say these workers need protection against the whims of vindictive supervisors. But as the case just decided by New York’s top court suggests, laws designed to protect against this problem have a way of taking on a life of their own.

Senator Schumer has kept his counsel on this matter, but the other Senate Democrats have been almost uniformly steadfast in an alliance with the public employees unions on this issue. Senator Clinton and Senator Lieberman, the latter a centrist, have been outspoken in denying the president the right to hire and fire homeland security employees as he sees fit. When she cast her courageous vote in favor of the war resolution last week, Mrs. Clinton said she wanted “this president or any future president to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country.” And we praised her for it. Subjecting Mr. Bush’s control of his wartime defense employees to the same rules that make the New York City Transit Authority keep its poor performers on the job is a recipe for homeland insecurity.