Up until now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she had the goods on President Trump and impeachment would move expeditiously.

Until she didn't. Just the partisan lineup of her impeachment inquiry vote on Halloween signaled trouble, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

With that her hand of cards now, now she says she wants to expand the impeachment inquiry beyond Ukraine, raising the specter of mission creep as well as long, drawn out, impeachment hearings on every topic the Democrats can scare up.

According to the Hill:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday it's possible that controversies beyond Ukraine could be part of the impeachment case against President Trump. House Democrats have recently sought to narrow their impeachment inquiry to the allegations stemming from an intelligence community whistleblower complaint that said Trump tried to pressure Ukraine to initiate politically charged investigations in return for the release of congressionally approved security aid.

In other words:

"Let us in! We want to see!" They're on their knees. They're slithering in the ooze. They're interviewing the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons...

as Tom Wolfe wrote. He's never hard to recall quotes from when the topic is jackasses.

In Pelosi's statement, she's saying, for sure, this time, hunt hither and yon, she'll find something that sticks.

In other words, she knows Ukraine is a loser, as Thomas Lifson noted here. But she's got the big impeachment machinery up in place and working, so with Ukraine not panning out like she said it would, she'll find some other grist for it.

Here's what's stupid about it:

Elections are just a year away. The Democratic nomination is just months away. Multiple Democrats running for the nomination also hold seats in the Senate, and as the nomination comes down to the wire, neither they, nor their party, are going to appreciate being drawn away from that activity to sit in on long, drawn-out, flimsy-evidence cooked-up-yesterday impeachment hearings.

There's a reason the Democrats were desperate to wrap up their impeachment hearings by Christmas. They've gone full jackrabbit and want the whole thing done by the year's end.

Because, as this excellent piece from the Federalist notes, for Democrats, the clock is already running out. If these impeachment hearings drag on, the Democratic nominee will have to be in the Senate for more hearings and votes and that means time away from campaigning in the general election, a bad position to be in if every vote counts, and you know the media will report that the Senate is in the almost bag for impeachment, whether it is or not.

The specter of a long, drawn-out impeachment over this, that, and the other, topic, all of which must be mastered and researched, is Pelosi's and the Democratic Party's biggest nightmare. Voters aren't going to be paying attention to the Democrats' 2020 campaign, they are going to be glued to their screens, watching what happens to Trump. And at some point they are going to get sick of it and tune out, too.

Yet Pelosi's announcement now suggests that these hearings are going to be longer and more involved than ever, cooking up new topics, with new witnesses, with new skulduggery planning to orchestrate the "narrative" as they did with this one, new media cooperator, new whistleblowers, new vettings, new schedulings...

Maybe Pelosi wants these hearings to drag out forever instead of just get wrapped up quick according to the original plan. That may mean she's calculating that Trump is going to win in a landslide and the new impeachment topics would be better used to knock out Trump in a second term. (Which certainly isn't a vote of confidence for the 2020 Democratic nominee and won't make that nominee happy.)

Or maybe she just knows that Ukraine is a loser and she doesn't want to lose face. Her claim to expand Ukraine sure doesn't give confidence to anyone that the Democrats finally have the goods on Trump, Maybe that's because they finally realize they've misfired on Trump, yet again.