hair-splitting

Hiding behind legalistic hair-splitting about "states' rights" may have worked in the pre-Dobbs days, when most voters shrugged off such talk as irrelevant and esoteric.

In his written judgement, Mr Justice Knowles said the grounds on which the panel had rejected the judge's application for relocation amounted to "semantic hair-splitting".

We don’t have any time or energy to spare for strategic hair-splitting, or for anything which dilutes a consistent, unified effort to stop a fascist dictator.

VOA’s stance has led to some intricate hair-splitting.

Defenders of book-banning often conceal their points behind a scrim of rhetorical hair-splitting or other pettifoggery.