The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999 turned out exactly the way it appeared as it was happening: pointless. Do Democrats think impeaching Donald Trump will be any more pointful?

Stop and take a deep breath, guys. This is a rerun from the era of “Ally McBeal” and “Frasier.” You know how this episode ends. Try to think ahead. The Democratic-controlled House can impeach a ham sandwich if they like. But convicting Trump in the Republican-controlled Senate in order to remove him from office would require 67 votes.

The Democrats look like they have maybe 48. GOP senators such as Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Thom Tillis (North Carolina) and the big dog, Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Senate majority leader and second-most-important man in Washington, are already digging in their heels and responding to impeachment talk with the polite equivalent of “AYFKM?”

Right-wing pundits are divided, with some (such as my National Review colleague David French) saying Trump clearly crossed the line. But most are saying Trump’s actions fall short of being serious enough to pull the trigger on impeachment. The nation remains polarized.

If Trump is impeached, he will follow the precedent set by Bill Clinton and ignore calls to resign. Then he’ll follow the second precedent set by Clinton and win in the Senate, which will set up the third precedent, a claim that his tormentors wasted the people’s time and money. Clinton’s approval rating rose by double digits as the process played out and Americans decided he was being needlessly put through a wringer. The lesson we all should have learned is: If you can’t make your impeachment bipartisan, don’t bother.

One doesn’t normally look to The New York Times for pushback to the Resistance, but this week the Paper of Record made an honest attempt to break outside the Acela corridor and ask Americans outside the political class what they think of impeaching the president. What they found was very little interest in impeachment. A recent poll showed 57 percent opposition to impeachment, and the Times’ reporting suggests that figure isn’t going to shift much.

That the Democrats have been talking impeachment since before Trump was even sworn in has made the voters a bit cynical about them. “I’m like, yeah, boy who cried wolf,” Donna Burgraff, a Tennessee independent who voted for Barack Obama and Donald Trump, told the Times. “You’ve got to have something big, and I haven’t seen something big.” One Times reporter said she spoke to six middle-of-the-road voters, and all of them vehemently opposed impeachment.

The Clinton impeachment saga lasted six months. If it takes six months this time, it’ll wrap up just seven months before the next election. Why bother? The voters will have their say soon enough. And impeachment will eat Washington. Nothing else will get done. This should matter to Democrats, because it looked as if they might get at least some of their gun-control ideas passed into law. Not anymore. Gun control has been pushed off the back burner and disappeared behind the stove.

If impeachment goes on for the next several months, Democrats will hardly be able to go to the voters and claim they delivered anything for them. Republicans in swing districts where gun control is popular might well say, “Look, we may have had a consensus to do something on this, but the Democrats decided to waste all of our time playing politics.”

The Democrats are chasing impeachment in Congress like a dachshund chasing a Subaru. What do they think they’re going to do with it once they catch it? Unless they come up with far stronger evidence than they have now, the only way this ends is with Trump sending Chuck and Nancy really savage tweets about their failed witch hunt.

Bill Clinton came out of his impeachment claiming vindication and trumpeting a 73 percent approval rating. If Trump gets anywhere near that, the Democrats might as well announce that they’re going to let him run unopposed in 2020.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.