Scott Douglas Gerber is a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an associated scholar at Brown University's Political Theory Project. His nine books include "A Distinct Judicial Power: The Origins of an Independent Judiciary, 1606-1787" (Oxford University Press). The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) With five active lawsuits about President Trump's financial records and tax returns, two involving whether senior advisers are immune from compelled witness testimony and one opposing the release of the unredacted Mueller report and other grand jury material, America's courts are busy adjudicating disputes that could impact the 2020 presidential election. And another consequential case could be heading to court as well: whether President Trump was impeached by votes in the US House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, or whether the matter must proceed to the Senate before he has been formally impeached.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) decision to wait to deliver the two Articles of Impeachment to the Senate until that body has laid out the rules for the trial has set the stage for such a potential landmark court action.

The decision to delay was influenced by the most famous constitutional law professor in America, Harvard's Laurence Tribe, who had penned an op-ed two days before the House adopted the Articles that insisted waiting to transmit them is necessary because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) "has announced his intention to conduct not a real trial but a whitewash, letting the president and his legal team call the shots." Consequently, Tribe maintained, "under the current circumstances, such a proceeding would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal."

Professor Tribe's Harvard Law School colleague Noah Feldman, who had testified before the Judiciary Committee as an expert witness that President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, responded to the decision to delay delivering the Articles of Impeachment with a bombshell op-ed of his own: Transmittal of the Articles to the Senate is part of the act of impeachment, he argued, and until that occurs the president has not been impeached.

As Feldman concisely put it, "Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial" so the Senate can conduct a trial.

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