Sending impeachment to the Senate: "A Very Strange Debate"

I hope to soon be proved wrong. But I just don't see how Nancy Pelosi's gambit of holding the articles of impeachment against Trump back from formal submission to the Senate until McConnell and his crew agree to call witnesses during the trial is a sensible play.

David Super (A Very Strange Debate Balkinization 12/23/2019) argues:

The notion that, by withholding the articles of impeachment, House Democrats can extract procedural concessions from Senator McConnell, is preposterous. As Senator McConnell has pointed out repeatedly, threatening to withhold something he does not want provides little leverage. It is like my saying I will refuse to dump a thousand gallons of toxic sludge on your lawn unless you give me a million dollars. On the other hand, ... permanent Senate rules and the decisions of Chief Justice Roberts, not Senator McConnell, will set the rules for a Senate trial and are likely to give the House’s impeachment managers ample opportunity to subpoena Administration officials. Senator McConnell clearly knows this; the Democrats would do well to tailor their strategy accordingly.

He makes the safe and obvious assumption that, as it look now, the Senate would acquit Trump in a trial. Clearly, we will never know what happens if the Senate never takes up the charges.

Super also reminds us of the stakes:

As for the questions of whether President Trump really has been impeached if the House never sends articles of impeachment to the Senate and whether the President would prefer to prevail in a Senate trial or to never have one, I do not know and I do not care. The former is a question of empty symbolism: the President’s place in history will not be determined by such technicalities but rather by his unprecedented relationship with Russia, by his transformation of the mores of the presidency, and by his throwing sobbing immigrant children into cages. The second question represents an unhealthy substitution of personal concerns for advancing the well-being of the country: we should be focusing on restoring our political institutions – which includes in part communicating with voters in ways they understand – and on ending our shameful treatment of immigrants rather than on the vanity of one man. [my emphasis]

He mentions several possible angles and motives possible in Pelosi's current stance. He doesn't mention the Occam's Razor explanation: that she never wanted to do impeachment and this is her way of burying it now.

So far, the only obvious results from his play that I can see is that the Republicans are arguing that Pelosi holding the charges back from the Senate shows the Democrats know that there charges were concocted. I don't know how seriously people in the FOX News bubble take their propaganda points. But whether they believe the charges against Trump are bogus or not, the current situation gives them an obvious talking point.

But Pelosi needs to formally send the impeachment article to deactivate that talking point and to achieve the most plausible immediate goal, which Super describes, "establishing once and for all which senators are willing to accept what the President has done may play an important role in reforming or replacing the Republican Party."