OPINION: Democrats may be outsmarting themselves on impeachment

History can be a wise teacher, but it's also crucial to take the right lessons. Confronted with a should-they-or-shouldn't-they proposal on impeachment, Democrats worry that if they fail to learn history's lessons, they are doomed to repeat them.

As they held a conference call to consider the Mueller report on Monday, party leaders in the House tried to resist falling into the same trap as Republicans who tried to oust President Bill Clinton and paid a heavy short-term political price.

They also stepped up their post-Mueller investigations by subpoenaing President Donald Trump's former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify in their investigation into whether the President obstructed justice, even as Trump sued to block another committee from accessing his financial records.

But while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to tamp down plans for impeachment during the conference call, some Democratic presidential candidates sharpened their arguments at CNN's town halls Monday night for moving forward with impeachment proceedings.

Polls show most Americans don't favor an impeachment battle and immovable support for Trump among his base, so many Democratic lawmakers are buying into the conventional wisdom that impeachment could consign them to the same fate as 1990s Republicans.

But a longer-term look at the fallout from Clinton's impeachment in 1998 may tell a different story than Democrats now seem to be remembering.

It's true that House Republicans performed poorly in the midterm polls in the middle of Clinton's impeachment drama and that the 42nd president left office with unusually high approval ratings.