The likely next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives doesn’t want the House to hurtle full speed toward impeaching Donald John Trump.

Nancy Pelosi offers high-minded reasons for saying impeachment is a non-starter: Democrats need to work with the president on legislation, impeachment would be too divisive, Americans have no appetite for it . . . blah, blah, blah.

I get all that. Pelosi isn’t giving the real reason for her public reluctance to impeach the president.

The new House will have a 235-200 Democratic majority in January. That’s enough votes to impeach the Republican president. Indeed, special counsel Robert Mueller well might give Democrats ample reason to impeach Trump once he releases his final report on the exhaustive investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians who attacked our electoral system in 2016.

Here’s the rub: Republicans will have a 53-47 majority in the next Senate. An impeachment would produce a trial in the Senate, where senators need 67 votes to convict a president on trial. That means all the Democrats — plus the two independent senators who caucus with them — would need to pull 20 Republican votes over to convict the president.

Do you believe that is going to happen, given the gutlessness exhibited by the Senate’s GOP majority? More to the point, does Speaker-to-be Pelosi believe that will happen? No and no.

The only possibility I could see occurring would be if a significant number of GOP senators declare they won’t seek re-election when their terms expire, which could imbue them with the courage they need to cast a vote to convict the impeached president.

Do I want the House to impeach the president? I’ll wait for Mueller’s report to make that call. I will stipulate, though, that my desire is that Mueller delivers the goods that include “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

My belief, moreover, tells me that Mueller is likely to reveal a lot more than what we know at this moment.