I think there’s a lot of forgetting as to what the real political calculation around impeachment was.

Agree or disagree, here’s what happened. https://twitter.com/markmobility/status/1339931498359754752

Starting *before* the Ukraine story broke there was *immense* pressure from safe seat House Democrats to impeach Trump.

Frontline members didn’t want to because they repped seats Trump won. Pelosi chose to protect frontliners and keep impeachment off the table.

This was a big political problem for Nancy Pelosi, she was squeezed between her frontliners’ antipathy to impeachment and the bulk of her caucus’ enthusiasm for it.

Then Ukraine broke and Pelosi handled it in a way designed to resolve that intra-caucus tension.

Impeachment happened fast, it happened on a narrow basis, it happened on an issue that frontline members (rightly or wrongly) were comfortable with, and then when it was done the blue seat backbenchers stopped agitating for more impeachment.

Whatever criticisms you may have of this approach, you won’t understand it unless you understand that its purpose was to de-fuse an awkward intra-caucus fight and it worked *at serving that purpose*

Now to be critical: The problem with the entrenched House leadership cadre is they are too good at this caucus management and not really interested in like “is this a popular message delivered by popular leaders that will make a lot of people vote for us?”