The timing also couldn’t be worse. There’s a new mass politics brewing. The lofty goal of saving the soul of the Republic doesn’t resonate with the millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Their political priority is rightly decent jobs, health care, housing rights, and the constraining of corporate interests. Many of these are issues that Elizabeth Warren excels at talking about: why shift the attention to dull Washington hearings?

It’s hard to see how talk of impeachment, Russia, obstruction, and corruption speaks to the anger and needs of ordinary Americans. Or how such debates wouldn’t swallow up the Democratic primary and reroute it away from the ground where candidates like Warren and Bernie Sanders are strongest.

And let’s not forget about the question of efficacy. The immediate goal is to get Trump out of office. But no one thinks that this can happen given the current composition of Congress. Talk of impeachment, then, is purely rhetorical.