Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. Photo: Matthew Teuten

There is a debate over the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that merit impeachment according to the U.S. Constitution, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard constitutional law professor, told a New York Law School audience Friday .

But that debate isn't relevant in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, he said.

"We're now dealing with something that so dramatically and obviously exemplifies the very heart of what a high crime and misdemeanor is that the lesson that will be taught if this president is not removed by the Senate after being impeached by the House is that nothing counts as a high crime and misdemeanor," he said.

Not impeaching Trump now, based on the information available, would mean the country no longer has the effective impeachment power that the Framers intended, Tribe said.

"The Framers of the Constitution realized that waiting until the next election wouldn't always be safe," he said, adding that the country's early leaders were particularly concerned by foreign intervention in elections and, more broadly, presidents acting toward their own benefit while in office.

Trump has threatened to take his impeachment to the courts, but Tribe said no court really has standing to handle the issue, especially if they're being asked to adjudicate the substance of the allegations against Trump.

He said there's some opening for a court to consider procedural issues, but even in that case, he's not sure which court would have standing.

Tribe praised the recent decision by U.S. Senior District Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York in Trump's lawsuit against the Manhattan District Attorney's Office over a grand jury subpoena for his tax returns.

Marrero dismissed the suit and criticized at length memos from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, which the president's lawyers have cited in their arguments for presidential immunity. The memos are not the same as high court opinions, he said.

The newly approved public phase of impeachment proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives is likely to have a significant effect on popular opinion, if former President Richard Nixon's impeachment process is any guide, Tribe said.

But comparing Nixon's situation to Trump's is like comparing "apples to apple orchards," Tribe said, so the Trump hearings should be even more dramatic.

Tribe was interviewed by Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN legal analyst who also writes for The New Yorker, as part of New York Law School's Sidney Shainwald Public Interest Lecture Series.

Before discussing impeachment, Toobin asked Tribe about his early childhood during World War II in Shanghai, where his parents had arrived after leaving Russia in the Jewish diaspora. Tribe and his mother were stateless, he said, but his father had American citizenship. The family eventually made it to the west coast of the United States, where Tribe grew up before attending Harvard.