President Bush’s “homeland security” chief, Tom Ridge, showed up before the Senate’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works yesterday and was greeted by New York’s own junior senator, Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton greeted Mr. Ridge in her characteristically thoughtful and well-prepared way, asking questions about how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would interact with homeland security and about the mental health effects of terrorist attacks. Then Senator Clinton came in with the kicker: “Finally, I have serious concerns about the Administration’s proposal to create a workforce that could be exempted from whistleblower protection and collective bargaining rights. We need to be able to recruit the best possible employees for this new agency and this legislation should not [create] barriers to the recruitment and retention of talented individuals.”

At this point, we are tempted to turn it over to the inimitable Mickey Kaus, who summarized the matter as follows: “The administration is of course right to want to be able to fire” Homeland Security employees — “the balance throughout government is tilted way too far in the employees’ direction now, and if the hindsight-driven investigations of pre-9/11 dot-nonconnecting showed anything it was that some people need firing.” And, Mr. Kaus asks wryly, “if the ability to hire and fire is good” for the Homeland Security agency, “why isn’t it equally good for the Department of Defense, or Health and Human Services?”

Mr. Kaus goes on to note: “This is the sort of crucial legislative detail that the real” Homeland Security “fight will be about, while the press reports on all the grander rhetorical positioning. In particular, Democrats (and Republicans from Northern Virginia) can be expected to resist ‘flexible’ and ‘contemporary’ labor provisions as if they were defending the Alamo, while doing everything to avoid drawing too much attention to the issue. Some things are more important than the fight against terrorism!”

But rather than letting Mr. Kaus have the last word here, it might as well belong to customs inspector Bill Ball, who is president of the National Treasury Employees Union chapter in Kansas City, Mo. “I’m a union man, no question about it,” Mr. Ball told the Washington Post. “But you’ve got to put your priorities in place. If we lose our union protections for national security, so be it.”

We’ve long believed in the right to organize and that, in the private sector, a good contract with a good union is good business. And there’s no question that the civil service system is useful as an antidote to the excesses of patronage. The administration’s proposal, however, wouldn’t eliminate either collective bargaining rights or whistleblower protections, but it would allow the new cabinet department to establish for its 170,000 employees a personnel management system that is “flexible,” “contemporary” and “grounded in the principles of merit and fitness.” And with the nation’s security on the line, if that’s too much to ask from the public employee unions and Senator Clinton — well, then we’d refer them to Mr. Ball’s advice to get their priorities straight.