In the New York stop-question-and-frisk case it looks like Judge Shira Scheindlin gets the last laugh. That’s the meaning of the decision of the riders of the Second Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals denying the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and other police unions a chance to intervene to defend the police. Judge Scheindlin may have been removed from the case for failure to maintain the appearance of impartiality. But Mayor de Blasio is now free to settle the claims on Judge Scheindlin’s terms and pay off the plaintiffs in the case.

The sages were animated by two points. One is that the unions didn’t intervene on time. “The unions,” the court wrote, “knew, or should have known, of their alleged interests in these controversial and public cases well before they filed their motions in September 2013.” It reminds us of Lilly Ledbetter, who lost her employment discrimination case against Goodyear Tire. The high court acknowledged the cause of action was “fully formed and present at the time the discriminatory employment actions were taken” against Mrs. Ledbetter. “She could have, and should have, sued,” the Supreme Court snorted.

Mrs. Ledbetter, of course, is a hero of the left. But hasn’t anybody spoken up for the NYPD save for the officers’ own unions, the New York Post, and Mayor Bloomberg. In the Ledbetter case, the deadline that was missed was a statutory bright line. In the stop-question-and-frisk case, it was more nuanced. How were the cops supposed to know that the judge would fail to maintain the required appearance of impartiality and that they were going to get betrayed by their own employer? Or that the City’s corporation counsel would dawdle until an anti-police mayor was elected?

The election was the second point that the Second Circuit used against the men and women in blue. “Granting the unions’ motions in the wake of the November 2013 mayoral election would essentially condone a collateral attack on the democratic process and could erode the legitimacy of decisions made by the democratically-elected representatives of the people,” the court declared. Blast, if that’s not a wholesale abdication of constitutional Article III powers, then we don’t know what is. All sorts of great cases consist of the courts overruling democratically elected representatives of the people.

What seemed to bother the Second Circuit in this case was the idea of public employees unions stepping in to confound the decisions of their employers. We are actually sympathetic to the Court’s wariness on this head: Imagine, say, had the public school teachers been betrayed by Mayor de Blasio instead of the city’s policemen. Lord only knows what mischief would follow were the teachers unions to speak for the city. Our own sense is that enough of a hash had been made of the stop-question-and-frisk case that someone should have been empowered to defend the police.

The court did make a point of saying that its decision “should not be construed as accepting or rejecting any part” of the liability and remedial orders issued by Judge Scheindlin. So the court said it understands the settlement will be construed like a “consent decree.” It warned against letting the settlement in this case “improperly deprive,” as the Supreme Court once put it in an unrelated case, “future officials of their designated legislative and executive powers.” It also said that nothing in its decision should deprive the unions of their collective bargaining rights or to inhibit the District Court from considering union interests.

It’s a slim reed, but it’s something. Our police are still, after all, in a war against crime and terror. The new mayor has been agreeing with their critics right, left, and center. The Central Park-jogger case has been settled with the plaintiffs getting millions. The choke-hold case is just getting started. Stop-question-and-frisk has been curtailed. Intelligence gathering, despite legal victories under Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly, has been dialed back in communities where terrorists hide. The lesson for the police unions seems to be to file to protect their members’ interests the moment these cases get into court. It seems that no one else will.