House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is predicting that Democrats will waste no time impeaching President Trump if they win control of the lower chamber in the midterm elections. “It’s guaranteed, probably on the first day — first or second day,” Johnson said Tuesday in an interview with Scott Jennings, a pro-Trump pundit. “Remember, they’ve already filed articles of impeachment in this Congress. And they’re raring to go.”

Johnson’s remarks are both a warning to Republicans and a campaign message designed to get GOP voters to the polls in November’s elections, when Democrats are now favored, by many handicappers, to win the House majority.

Polls indicate that Trump’s policies are widely unpopular, even among many Republicans, but a much smaller number support his removal from office. Many liberals want him ousted, but many other Democrats fear that talk of impeachment will only energize GOP voters who might otherwise sit the midterms out.

Those dynamics have created a minefield for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and his leadership team, who are fighting to keep the party focused on the volatile economy even as liberals on and off of Capitol Hill are ramping up their calls to remove Trump from office.

Jeffries, who is in line to become Speaker if the House changes hands, has sought to balance those competing pressures by keeping all options open while committing to none. “We haven't ruled anything out when it comes to all of the tools available to us to hold people accountable, and we haven't ruled anything in,” Jeffries told reporters in Washington last month, as the House was leaving town for the long election recess. “That's been our position. That will remain our position.”

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, went a step further to defuse the impeachment talk, dismissing the idea as a Republican scare-tactic. “This is something, oftentimes, I think the right-wing media wants us to talk about,” Aguilar said in late September. “But it's not anything that is top of the agenda for House Democrats.”Democrats were forced to confront the impeachment question head on last month, when Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) forced a vote on impeachment articles related to the deaths of civilians at the hands of federal immigration enforcement officers.

The resolution was supported by 147 Democrats — nearly 70 percent of the caucus — but Jeffries, Aguilar and other party leaders distanced themselves from the effort by voting “present.”Green will be gone next year, a casualty of Trump’s mid-district redistricting push. But a number of incoming liberals want Democrats to fight harder against the administration, and they may take up the impeachment mantle where Green left off.

Johnson, for his part, maintains that all the talk of impeachment is largely irrelevant because Republicans, he says, will keep control of the House next year. “This is not going to happen,” he told Jennings. “Let’s just paint this alternative world, OK. Cause I’m convinced, Scott, we can hold this majority.”