"The pitiful three" they have been called by the frustrated Republican prosecutors. These are the three witnesses that are to be deposed in President Clinton's trial and open the way to a speedy conclusion.
Mr Henry Hyde's use of the term "pitiful" is not a personal reference to Ms Monica Lewinsky, Mr Vernon Jordan and Mr Sidney Blumenthal, who will be the witnesses. Instead it refers to the slashing of the list of a dozen or more witnesses whom the prosecutors had hoped to call.
The problem of witnesses has been hanging over the trial since it began three weeks ago under rules agreed unanimously by Republican and Democratic senators.
The Republicans wanted them, as they could embarrass the President, but the Democrats and the White House were strongly opposed. It was decided to postpone any decision on witnesses until the legal presentations had been heard.
As the moment of truth approached this week, the spirit of bi-partisanship was strained as the Republican prosecutors, all from the House of Representatives, insisted that they needed to call witnesses to persuade the Senate that the President was guilty. Not all the Republican senators were convinced, let alone the Democrats. The impeachment articles had been voted on in the House on the basis of the Starr report and annexes running into thousands of pages and without any need for witnesses.
What could witnesses who had been interviewed - 22 times in the case of Ms Lewinsky - and who had testified at length to the grand jury add if they were brought before the Senate? The prosecutor's ploy of flying Ms Lewinsky from California to Washington for "debriefing" rebounded as she added nothing substantial to her earlier testimony. "I gave them nothing", she is reported to have said. The Senate majority leader, Senator Trent Lott, worked hard to keep his Republican members united. By keeping the list down to three, he hoped he could also reach out to the suspicious Democrats. After all, two of the witnesses, Mr Jordan and Mr Blumenthal, are close to the President, and Ms Lewinsky has testified that "nobody told me to lie".
At the same time, Mr Lott and a small group of moderate Republicans worked on an "endgame" which would wrap the trial up quickly once the three witnesses had been deposed this week by prosecution and defence and the videotapes and transcripts made available to all 100 senators.
The plan envisages a vote on Tuesday on whether it is necessary to call the witnesses to the floor of the Senate. The hope is that the videotaped depositions will suffice. Then after closing presentations, the Senate could vote Yea or Nay on the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
No one on Capitol Hill believes there will be the required two-thirds majority to convict Mr Clinton on either charge, so that should bring an end to a saga which has transfixed Washington and much of the US as well as the world for the past year.
The Republicans are afraid that this "acquittal" will be seen as vindicating the President and allowing him to celebrate his "innocence". Getting the Democrats and the White House to buy into this endgame is not going to be easy. From the moment the idea of witnesses had been raised by the Republicans, the White House loudly protested and insisted that this would drag the trial out for weeks or months as its lawyers ploughed through 50,000 pages of documents with the Starr report they had never seen.
This was seen as the White House lawyers playing a hard game of poker and hoping its bluff would keep witnesses off the stand.
The Republicans have offered to end it next week. The White House is crying "Unfair" and pleading that the President's lawyers must have more, much more time for his defence if there are witnesses.
It is not over yet.