It’s plain math.

Democratic lawmakers can impeach President Donald Trump in the House — but they have nowhere near the votes they need to remove him from office in the Senate.

Their most optimistic count would be 50 for impeachment.

Yet it takes 67 to convict.

That’s 17 votes shy.

Not only that, but 50 Republican senators are already on record against the impeachment inquiry.

See what I mean in this tweet below:

This is why the whole thing could blow up in the face of the Democrats.

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It could leave dozens of them vulnerable to GOP challengers in 2020.

So what gives?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) know those numbers, too, and are not dumb people.

Why would they lead their troops into a trap — into a suicide mission?

What if, instead — as the rumor that’s quietly circulating in D.C. circles suggests — this is mainly not about Trump at all?

Sure, they want him hurt badly. But what if some of them want him re-elected because they’ve got their eyes on taking back their own party or getting the old guard out of the way so that new faces like Michelle Obama can take over in 2024?

Let’s look at a few scenarios here.

Scenario One: The Revenge of the Old Guard. This play has Pelosi and Schumer giving such far-Left lawmakers as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) anything she wants.

She wants House impeachment? She has it (though it’ll go nowhere in the Senate).

She wants Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as the nominee, maybe Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? Got that, too.

She wants a hard-Left Democrat going up against a GOP incumbent that many Democrats loathe — just as in 1972 (George McGovern vs. Richard Nixon)? You got it.

(And just like in 1972 — the hard Left will go down in flaming defeat.)

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But this scenario would allow old-guard liberals like Pelosi to say then to the young leftists after a presidential loss in 2020, “You had your chance. We gave it all to you. You blew it. Now go back to the sticks.”

LifeZette talked to noted presidential scholar and former Democrat operative Tim H. Blessing of Alvernia College in Pennsylvania about this possibility. “The impeaching of Trump is about much more than impeaching Trump,” he said on Monday. “Instead, Trump, and the nation, may be in the process of being held hostage to an in-party civil war.”

“The relentless and almost certain-to-be-futile pursuit of impeachment by the party’s far-Left will tarnish that far-Left as the effort collapses and moderate Democrats get blowback and an early end to their congressional career,” he added. “Underneath this obvious battle, though, is a much more desperate struggle. The very top leadership of the Democratic Party, a gerontocracy of not-quite-progressives, appears to be using impeachment to keep a hostile takeover of the party from happening and to take on their own dissidents in the ultimate game of political hardball.”

Scenario Two: The Ice Flow. What if hard-Left Dems are looking to the future in the same intra-party conflict?

They are no fans of the old relative moderates and have made it known more than once.

Are they plotting to send the old guard out to the endless sea of political oblivion on an ice flow? To do that, former Vice President Joe Biden has got to get the nomination.

But it has to be a chalice poisoned by the negative reaction of the American people to impeachment once Trump is exonerated by the Senate. 

Related: McCarthy Slams Schiff’s Impeachment Push as a “Calculated Coup’

If Newton’s Third Law (“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”) holds — then Biden loses and many moderate, first-term Dems elected to the House in red states in 2018 could also go down in 2020.

That would leave hard-Left members of Congress in safely hard-Left House districts with more say — because they’d have fewer internal enemies.

Blessing said on Monday, “The hard-Left is leaving Biden out to dry. They know perfectly well what is going to happen once this reaches the Senate. Biden and his son [Hunter Biden] will become the focus of the trial and it will, if Biden gets the nomination, destroy Biden in the fall — taking moderates with him.”

That opens the door for that “hostile takeover” that Blessing references. Because if Trump loses, then those on the far-Left have to wait an extra four years to have their own presidential nominee.

That’s because the new Democrat president elected in 2020, under this scenario, will want to run for re-election in 2024 — thus making Michelle Obama and her ilk wait until 2028 to go for the big office.

That is, unless they start an overt party civil war in 2020 by challenging the sitting Dem president — a move the GOP would love.

These scenarios may explain why Pelosi and Schumer are leading their party over a cliff that they see coming a mile away. Just running against a “disgraced president” won’t be enough to make up for the impeachment suicide mission and the pro-Trump backlash they’ll face.

Scenarios like these could be at play — otherwise the Democrats are engaging in “political malpractice,” to quote Blessing, of the highest order.

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