Word: microphilia
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This legislative preoccupation with the trivial, which is confirmed in almost every state capital, goes by the term microphilia. Though the ailment was named only a few years ago (by a justly obscure political diagnostician), it has been in evidence as long as state legislatures have existed-though sometimes upstaged by more dramatic defects such as procrastination, carelessness and venality. These larger historic faults were undoubtedly in the mind of John Burns when he wrote in The Sometime Governments (1970): "We expect very little of our legislatures, and they continually live up to our expectations." In fact, many state legislatures...
Legislative microphilia ranges well beyond an obsession with official totems and artifacts. One classic manifestation occurred this season in Colorado, where legislators climaxed their session with a mighty struggle over the apostrophe in Pike's Peak: for the benefit of constituents who had never come to terms with grammar, they outlawed the apostrophe. In Alabama, legislators reached the session's final day without action on a single major bill-but not without having played, once again, their recurring conflict with the capital city government over parking space for their cars. Idaho lawmakers, for their part, indulged...
...South Carolina that one member this year exposed the absurdity with a resolution intended to commend "all persons, male and female, young and old, tall and short, fat and skinny, who have performed any act or deed during the past five months worthy of commendation." A sort of subdued microphilia was evident in Concord, where New Hampshire's solons spent several months intensely debating the question of whether they had any reason to be in session at all. In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that a. typical legislative leader. New Jersey Assembly Speaker Christopher Jackman, could...
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