One has to wonder if the majority of state lawmakers truly possess the will and intestinal fortitude to police themselves on ethics and corruption.

The General Assembly's continuing debacle on an ethics bill that would provide for a process of revoking the taxpayer-funded portion of state pension benefits for state and municipal officials and employees convicted of political corruption offers a prime case in point.

Lawmakers have been talking about the pension penalty issue for four years, but still haven't gotten off the dime in putting it into law.

Remember the overly optimistic forecasts from several Capitol quarters before the session began in early February that this would be this session's crowning achievement?

Yes, the concept is still alive in the dwindling hours of this session, which faces a midnight Wednesday adjournment, but it's dangling for its life by a rather slim thread.

This year's version of the ethics bill won passage in the state Senate. However, House Democrats, in an appeasement of state employee unions, threw a last-minute curve into the issue by making the pension revocation provision a two-tiered set-up: one set of ethical standards for elected and appointed officials and another set of standards for public employees.

The reason, according to state Reps. Christopher Caruso, D-Bridgeport, and Diane Urban, D-North Stonington, is because state collective bargaining contracts should be honored.

"The fact is collective bargaining is

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collective bargaining," Caruso argued during the House debate.

Hogwash. A convicted criminal is a convicted criminal whether they are elected, appointed or from state or municipal employee ranks.

This amendment — which came out of nowhere to most lawmakers and the governor's office — seems to be specifically designed to kill the ethics measure for another year.

Let's leave it up to state and federal judges to decide whether pension revocation, or a part thereof, is warranted and under what circumstances. If collective bargaining is truly a hindrance to application of the law, the state can bargain for a provision to enforce the law when state employee union contracts come up for renegotiation. Much attention on the ethics issue has certainly centered on high profile political personages such as ex-Gov. John G. Rowland, ex-state Sen. Ernest E. Newton II, ex-Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim and ex-state Sen. Louis C. DeLuca.

Certainly, they merited the punishment they received for their corruption and misdeeds.

But think back earlier this decade to the many arrests and subsequent convictions of state Department of Motor Vehicles employees engaged in an operation that netted hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps millions, by falsifying and illegally selling or taking bribes for phony Connecticut driver's licenses and identification cards.

While many of the bogus documents were sold to illegal immigrants who would line up regularly at DMV offices, law enforcement officials and court records point out that many of the bogus documents ended up being used nationally by drug traffickers and identity thieves.

In state cases, bogus licenses issued under the names of legitimate license holders were used to set up a false credit card account at an upstate jewelry store and another to draw thousands of dollars from the legitimate license holder's bank account.

Fortunately, none of the bogus licenses and documents have turned up yet as matches on terrorist watch lists in the wake of 9/11.

One could go on with examples about other public employees in the state departments of Environmental Protection, Public Works and Transportation or the city of Bridgeport, to underline the point emphatically.

In addition, the ethics legislation contains several meritorious provisions aside from the pension revocation issue that ought to be law.

There remains the need for state lawmakers to regain the trust and public confidence of citizens like you and me here in the hinterlands. Unfortunately, lawmakers are not rebuilding that confidence by consistently placing roadblocks in front of this major facet of ethics reform.

Stephen J. Winters is editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6203 or by e-mail at swinters@ctpost.com.