Assassination complete: Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins engineered a surprise floor vote Wednesday on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Justice Hector LaSalle to head the state’s highest court and got him shot down, 39-20.

As Stewart-Cousins and her No. 2, Sen. Mike Gianaris, had plainly laid down the law, it was a near party-line vote, with only two Long Island senators (Democrat Monica Martinez and Republican Mario Mattera) crossing over.

LaSalle originally had far more Democratic support, but moderates opted not to anger their chiefs for what seemed a lost cause. Plus, two of his Dem backers were out of town, cut off not just from voting but from speaking up.

Just the day before, Stewart-Cousins was imperiously ruling out any vote: “The [state] Constitution allows us to make our own rules,” she insisted. But she apparently didn’t want her view tested in court — and a suit filed by state Sen. Anthony Palumbo’s (R-LI) would’ve done just that.

So she pivoted to calling the nomination an “ongoing distraction” and a “wedge issue to distract us from other pressing matters” as she rushed the vote without meaningful notice. For all her protests about the Senate’s rights, she plainly doesn’t give a darn about those of her own members.

This follows the initial ASC-Gianaris gambit of stacking the Judiciary Committee with new anti-LaSalle members in a bid to dispense with the judge there.

LaSalle, the presiding justice of the Appellate Division of the Second Judicial Department, would’ve been New York’s first Latino chief judge. Latinos for LaSalle rightly called this final bit of skullduggery “a sad day for fairness and decency” and “a preordained vote that makes a mockery of the merit-based system.”

Hochul, meanwhile, stands once again publicly humiliated by her fellow Democrats. Her claim about wielding an “iron fist in a velvet glove” (in order to get a vote on the Senate floor) is exposed as empty bluster. If she’s not to get utterly rolled by the progressives in coming budget negotiations, she’ll need to find a way to play much harder ball.

The judicial screening panel will have 120 days to return a new list of seven nominees for the gov to consider. Her obvious move is to pick another centrist jurist and former prosecutor, in defiance of the far left’s demands for a nominee who will turn the top court into an activist body imposing the progressive agenda with no need for legislators to actually vote on it.

Don’t let this power play triumph, governor.