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Letter: Hatch has been in Congress too long

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who also serves as the Senate's president pro tempore, is surrounded by reporters on the way to a meeting of the GOP leadership as lawmakers rush to wrap up their work and pass a funding bill to avert a government shutdown, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Dec. 14, 2015. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Orrin Hatch needs to retire for a multitude of reasons. He is no longer the man who worked with Sen. Edward Kennedy to improve our country.

Visual evidence is the video of him trying to answer a question from Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri about the proposed new health plan. Hatch seems to not understand the question and cannot mount a cogent answer until one of his aides tells him what to say — all recorded.

Left to his own words, he has issued patronizing remarks on Native Americans in Utah, and disparaged people receiving health care through the government (which he is) as being on the dole, willing to “take every dime they can get.”

He has become an apologist for President Trump for doing so many things Hatch would be humiliated if he had been caught doing. However, some of it wore off on the senator. He claims the Republicans “shot their wad” on health care, a crude sexual idiom, but his office claims it’s a Civil War reference.

When a senator uses colloquialisms from over 150 years ago, he/she has been in Congress too long.

Michael M. Geer

Sandy