Warning to GOP senators: You’re being set up.

House Democrats planned this week’s standoff over witnesses from the very start of their impeachment inquiry. If you doubt that, just ask yourself a simple question: Why did House Democrats not only fail to litigate executive privilege issues before sending their impeachment articles to the Senate but also block a federal court from issuing a ruling to decide whether the president could claim privilege?

In October, the House subpoenaed deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman to testify in the impeachment investigation. After the White House invoked immunity to preclude Kupperman’s testimony, he filed a lawsuit to ask the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to resolve the conflict between the two branches of government. John Bolton’s counsel publicly resolved to be guided by the court’s ruling in Kupperman’s case.

But before the court could hear arguments, House Democrats short-circuited the judicial review. On Nov. 6, they withdrew Kupperman’s subpoena, and then asked the court to declare Kupperman’s case moot — which would prevent a decision on the merits. On Dec. 30, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon did so. In his memorandum, he noted that “balancing Congress’s well-established power to investigate with a President’s need to have a small group of national security advisers who have some form of immunity from compelled Congressional testimony” was a serious dilemma that the courts would eventually need to resolve.

Leon was unable to resolve that dilemma because House Democrats actively prevented him from doing so. As White House Deputy Counsel Patrick Philbin explained to the Senate on Wednesday, House Democrats “were going to get a decision … that would go to the merits of the issue. The House managers withdrew the subpoena. The House of Representatives decided they wanted to moot out the case so they wouldn’t get a decision.”

Why did Democrats prevent the court from ruling on the merits of the president’s claim of executive privilege? Because the ruling could have undermined their impeachment case. On Dec. 18, the House passed two articles of impeachment, one of which charged President Trump with obstruction of Congress for refusing to provide witnesses and documents. Imagine if the court then ruled just days later that the president’s claim of executive privilege was valid. It would have destroyed the Democrats’ case for obstruction. To prevent that from happening, they decided to block judicial review — and then impeached the president for seeking the very judicial review that they had stymied!

Then, after preventing the court from ruling on whether the president could order his top aides not to testify, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced that she was holding back the articles of impeachment as leverage to force the Senate to call those witnesses. Her goal was transparently political: to force this week’s sham witness fight so that Democrats either could charge Senate Republicans with “voting for a coverup” or saddle them with months of litigation over executive privilege that the House prevented the court from settling.

This episode proves that the push for witnesses is not an honest search for truth, but a dishonest political power play — one that was planned from the very start of the impeachment process. Not only are House Democrats using impeachment as a political weapon against the president; they also are using it as a political weapon against Senate Republicans as well.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, revealed that when she asked the House impeachment managers why the House didn’t reissue subpoenas after passing the resolution authorizing the impeachment inquiry and granting subpoena power to the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, the House managers dismissed her question as a “red herring.” No, it is not. It further exposed that the House’s demand for the Senate to call witnesses is a political ploy.