The sheer audacity!

Chutzpah: a Yiddish word meaning brazen gall or audacity. Example 1: After Whitewater, the Clinton impeachment, Benghazi, and Hillary email “scandals,” the Republicans have the nerve to call the impeachment hearings nothing more than a partisan exercise. Example 2: After blocking the Supreme Court nomination of

Merrick Garland on the grounds that the incoming president in 2016 should fill the vacancy, Mitch McConnell has announced that the

Senate will fill any

2020 vacancy by the end of Trump’s present term. It is amusing that McConnell’s pronouncement seems to indicate some doubt about Trump’s prospects for re-election. Example 3: Republicans who almost screamed about Barack Obama’s use of executive orders have been silent about Trump’s serious abuses of authority. Sorry, no room for the other 993 examples.

Republicans claim that American voters should make the final decision on impeachment while ignoring polls that showed that a majority of voters favor having impeachment hearings if not actual impeachment

I see Trump and the Republicans’ demand to know the name of the whistle-blower in the Ukraine affair as subterfuge in that knowledge of his/ her name would make no difference in conducting the impeachment inquiry. It is instead a blatant attempt to intimidate any future whistle-blower from disclosing abuses by the Trump administration.

I offer a defense of Trump in the Ukraine affair: Since many Americans know that there has been no proven connection between the Trump mouth and the Trump brain, I suggest that, while the Trump mouth babbled about an investigation of the Bidens in his infamous phone call, the Trump brain was marveling at his perfect conversation and therefore did not notice the mouth’s demands. Perhaps we can impeach the mouth and retain the rest of Trump for the voters to deal with. ED CHESS Little Rock