One of the most iconic scenes in moviedom is the ending of “Thelma and Louise.”

Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are cornered in their car at the edge of the Grand Canyon after a crime spree. They could surrender, but Thelma tells Louise “Let’s keep going.”

They do, and the movie ends with a shot of their convertible going off a cliff. (See clip below)

Sort of like what the Democrats in Congress are doing with this move to impeach President Trump.

But one New Jersey congressman is doing his best to keep Louise (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) from hitting the gas.

That’s Jeff Van Drew, a Democrat from Cape May County who is in his first term representing a district at the south end of the state that has traditionally gone Republican.

The 66-year-old Van Drew, who is a dentist by profession, was one of only two Democrats to vote against the resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry that passed by a margin of 232-196 last week.

As far back as July, Van Drew was saying of impeachment, “even if we start to do it, we also come to the point that we realize that nothing is going to happen in the Senate. So at the end of the day, it will be a failed process.”

When I spoke to him last month, Van Drew hadn’t changed his tune.

“As Americans, we need to understand the seriousness of impeachment. It was meant for exceptional circumstances. That didn’t mean you didn’t like a president or found him unwieldy or difficult,” he said.

That applies to many Democrats. The mere mention of Trump’s name drives them into a red-hot rage.

As for Van Drew, he has a view of politics that has largely disappeared from the Democratic Party since the Clinton years.

“Bubba,” as he was known, outsmarted the GOP by appealing to both rural and urban voters.

Van Drew shares that talent. The part of Cape May County where he lives is often described as being below the Mason-Dixon Line. That’s not literally true. The line did not extend east from Pennsylvania.

But it’s figuratively true, and Van Drew has a Clinton-like ability to steal the rural vote from under the noses of the Republicans.

You don’t do that by firing up the Republican base. And that’s exactly what the Democrats will do if they go on to a formal vote for impeachment.

An impeachment that goes along party lines, as this one is going, will fire up the base better than all the re-election rallies Trump could hold.

Democrats have spent much of Trump’s term talking of impeachment. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California started calling for impeachment three months after Trump took office. Recently she tweeted that the president should be put in solitary confinement.

For what crime? There’s no law that says a president can’t threaten to hold back aid from a foreign country. If there were, Joe Biden would have been prosecuted when as vice president he made that threat to withhold aid from Ukraine until the prosecutor was fired.

Biden has said repeatedly that that was no crime. Maybe not. But there was a huge conflict of interest stemming from his son Hunter’s $50,000-per-month sinecure with a Ukrainian gas company.

At the moment, it looks like it’s Biden who will hit the canyon floor first. The latest poll from Iowa, which hosts the first contest in the Democratic primaries, has Biden in fourth place.

At the moment the leader in the polls is a candidate from Massachusetts, Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Candidates from Massachusetts don’t work out well – for either party. Ask Mitt Romney. Or Mike Dukakis.

If I were a Democratic leader, I’d be concentrating on finding a candidate who could beat Trump in those crucial swing states in the Rust Belt that put him over the top in 2016.

Maybe it’s Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who was an unknown when this race began and has now pulled ahead of Biden in that Iowa poll.

But those caucuses are a mere three months away and the Democrats don’t need the distraction of an impeachment.

A lot of my fellow deep thinkers are ascribing Van Drew’s “no” vote to his desire to avoid alienating the voters in a district that went for Trump in 2016.

But maybe he just wants his fellow Democrats to adopt a strategy that will have them come out ahead next November.

If they were smart, they’d listen when he tells them to hit the brakes.

That canyon is really deep.

ADD: When I got Van Drew on the phone Saturday, he added an 1835 quote from Alexis DeTocqueville that applies directly to this situation: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”

That’s exactly what the Democrats are doing - or trying to do. But an impeachment on party lines sets a precedent that will come back to haunt them, even though it is doomed to fail.

BELOW - WHAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE ABOUT TO DO: