Nancy Pelosi, desperately trying to hold onto her speakership in the face of the Trump-haters (nearly all from safe districts) demanding impeachment, must have been furious at her second-highest-ranking member yesterday saying it's only a matter of time until President Trump is impeached.  Pelosi knows that if impeachment proceeds, the freshmen Democrats in the House who provided the Democrat majority that made her speaker, most of them elected in swing districts, will face a tough re-election bid.  She would revert back to minority leader in a GOP-run House that could enable a re-elected President Trump to advance his legislative agenda when voters react negatively to what would be an impeachment fiasco.

Rep. James Clyburn is the majority whip in the House of Representatives, second only to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer as an aide to Pelosi.  And yesterday he lobbed what amounts to a stink bomb at Pelosi's dream of returning as speaker.  Clyburn acknowledged that the public does not yet support impeachment:

Clyburn, who serves as the Democratic whip, told CNN's Jake Tapper that his party's leadership is waiting to open an impeachment inquiry until there is broader public support for for [sic] the move, but effectively guaranteed that the president would be impeached at some point.

"We think we have to bring the public along. We're not particularly interested in the Senate," Clyburn said, pushing back on Tapper's suggestion that Democrats might wait to impeach until there is support for the move among Senate Republicans. "We think if we efficiently and effectively educate the public, then we will have done our jobs and we can move on an impeachment vote and it will stand and maybe it will be what needs to be done to incentivize the Senate to act."

"But it sounds like you're — you think that the president will be impeached, or at least proceedings will begin in the House at some point, but just not right now?" Tapper went on to ask.

"Yes, exactly what I feel," Clyburn responded.

Rep. James Clyburn (USDA photo).

That "education" of the public about impeachment is extremely risky, as Pelosi knows, but Clyburn is too dense to realize. Roger Luchs stated the danger succinctly in an email to me:

Do Dems really want to start impeachment against Trump, given prospect that Obama/Biden/Hillary (and perhaps others in the Obama administration) engaged in what would clearly be impeachable offenses?

We know Obama/Biden were in on key meetings (setting up the fraudulent Russia Hoax investigation) and we know of Hillary's illegal conduct. We know Obama was sending and receiving email from her illegal, un-secured server, failing to protect classified information . So maybe it's not too far afield to suggest that had any of this come out while Obama still in office, it would have warranted examination of impeachment.

Many people have hypothesized that the Dems want to use impeachment as a cover to obscure the coming exposure of the crimes involved in setting up the Russia hoax, and less often mentioned, the corrupt Uranium One deal.  But I think Roger is on to something with his suggestion that raising the point of impeachment casts a shadow on the genuine high crimes and misdemeanors that took place in the Obama administration.