The stage is set for a “high stakes hearing.” Washington braces for “dramatic testimony.” Local bars are opening early with happy-hour specials for “blockbuster congressional hearings.”

If this all sounds familiar, it should. It’s sweeps for the swamp. Think your favorite reality show, just with lower ratings. It’s the same formula to maximize drama, but with “new characters and plot twists,” as NPR recently headlined the Democrats’ latest impeachment ploy.

For Democrats, it is always narrative over substance. Instead of facts, we get poorly written scripts from wannabe screenwriters who couldn’t make it in Hollywood, trying their best to bring their (alternate) reality series to Washington. Democrats’ first star was Robert Mueller, until he and his team of anti-Trump attorneys and FBI agents came up empty.

“The Mueller report renders thousands of T-shirts irrelevant,” lamented Vox.com after the Mueller operation against President Trump ended in a bust. If only we could get our 22 months and $32 million back.

Of course, it wasn’t just T-shirts. Sales of Mueller prayer candles have plummeted. But the Resistance would soon have a team of brand new folk heroes to put their faith in: un-elected bureaucrats, some whom the media refuses to name, working in and outside the government to overturn the results of an election less than a year before the next one.

In fact, the latest impeachment sham marched from Russia into Ukraine (as Putin did during the Obama years) only one day after Mueller’s woeful performance on Capitol Hill, which was the last, as The New York Times put it, “blockbuster that wasn’t.”

“Democrats argued that hearing from Robert S. Mueller III on television could transform the impeachment debate,” the Times noted.

Democrats have been working hard to “transform the impeachment debate,” since 12:19 p.m. on Inauguration Day. Democrats are working so hard they retreated behind closed doors for six weeks into a hot, crowded room in the basement of the Capitol. Adam Schiff annexed the SCIF (the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to hold his unclassified inquisition, where the few members of Congress who are allowed to participate describe it as “excruciating” and smelling like a “locker room.” If only Democrats were that dedicated to working for the country.

Schiff is the new star of the Resistance. “His Ukraine investigation has now been invested with all the hopes and dreams that Democrats once placed in the special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s Russia probe,” the Times reported in a glowing magazine profile eerily reminiscent of other ghosts of Resistance past (Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti). “In Schiff … Democrats believe they have found a more reliable vessel than the cipherlike Mueller and an opportunity for a do-over of sorts.”

Ah, the do-over. Only this time Schiff is no Mueller-like figurehead, but fully in command of a team of even angrier Democrats who have spearheaded this operation from the beginning.

But no matter how many times Democrats try to re-do 2016 -- this time based on what an unelected bureaucrat told an unelected bureaucrat who heard it from an unelected bureaucrat staffer -- they will never accept the result. The longer voters witness Democrats working tirelessly against the president, instead of for the people they represent, the sooner this will become yet another Resistance flop.