Florida legislators often plead they didn't know what they were doing during the final hours of a session, and chances are that they're telling the truth. But that is at best an apology, not an excuse, and even as a mea culpa it wears too thin, especially when it comes from the mouth of someone of Mike Fasano's status. As House majority leader -- the speaker's hand-picked enforcer -- Fasano has the presumed duty to ensure that all of his troops know what they are doing.

In the instance that our colleague Lucy Morgan reported this week, Fasano allowed another legislator to amend a pension bill, which he was managing during floor debate, so that some highly paid officials will be able to pocket their pensions, including deferred retirement lump sums, and then seek re-election to their present offices. The amendment defeats the purpose of the deferred-retirement law, which was to give them an incentive to make way for new blood.

Confronted with what he had allowed, Fasano admitted that he "did not know what the amendment did" and conceded it to be "wrong, very wrong." Elected officials, he added, should not receive "special treatment."

Had he taken time to read the amendment, rather than rely on the sponsor's brief description of it, Fasano would have seen that it referred specifically, in two places, to elected officials. But perhaps he was preoccupied with his own agenda at the time, which was to do a hatchet job on Tom Herndon, the widely respected director of the state Board of Administration.

Imagine that Fasano -- or any legislator pleading ignorance -- were an attorney trying to explain to clients that they lost their case because he had misread the other side's pleadings. Or that Fasano, a stock broker, had bankrupted an investor by buying the wrong securities. In either case, the excuse would be but a sad prelude to costly damages and possibly professional discipline as well. Why should the voters and taxpayers of Florida tamely accept equivalent malpractice from their elected legislators?

Fasano's embarrassment could be constructive, however, if it prompts him and other Republican leaders to put a firm and final stop to the recklessness that characterizes the final days of a session. For example, no floor amendment should be in order unless it comes with a written analysis from the staff of a committee that considered the bill to which it would be attached.

As for Fasano's remark that elected officials do not deserve special treatment, he plainly has a lot of work to do. Legislators and elected officials accrue pension credit at nearly twice the rate of most rank-and-file employees who must pay for the health insurance that legislators and other top brass get free.

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