It isn’t just your imagination—Congress really is spending more time on the urgent business of naming post offices.
In an online article today, the Courier Express and Postal Observer runs the numbers from 1973 to the present and finds a startling increase both in the number of post office naming laws, and their share of the overall volume of legislation passed in each Congress. Although the totals have fallen the last four years, they remain way above the average for much of the period in question.
The Observer attributes the trend largely to the post-9/11 desire to honor those who died in the 2001 terrorist attacks and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also tartly notes lawmakers’ failure thus far to pass legislation shoring up the U.S. Postal Service that runs all those post offices.
“It is too bad that Congress does not understand the irony in its rush to name post offices to honor heroes when it has not taken steps to ensure the survival of the institution whose facilities are used to provide the memorial.”
