David N. Mayer

October 2003 -- One of the most intense partisan conflicts in Washington, D.C., during the Bush presidency has been the struggle over Senate confirmation of President Bush's nominees to the federal court system. It has been not only a conflict over persons but also a clash of ideas, a conflict over differing jurisprudential theories.

Editor's Note: The following commentary is a brief and edited excerpt from the concurring opinion that law professor and constitutional scholar David N. Mayer released in conjunction with the April 12 publication of a report by the Scholars Commission on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings Matter. To read the full report of the commission, visit http://www.tjheritage.org/scholars.html.

"The twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot," head of the totalitarian Cambodian government that killed nearly half his country's eight million people. Such is the dramatic charge in The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, a recent book by the left-wing Irish litterateur Conor Cruise O'Brien.